When working with an orchestra, you never spend more than 20 minutes per recording session.

But enough joking. I am singing. This is all my life.

My strength is my enthusiasm.

I was married at 16, a father at 17 and divorced at 18.

To stay at my best, I have to stop talking during the preceding day.

With my personal preparation at the piano, I can afford to hum at half voice.

Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.

In the last century, everybody was singing lower.

Should it happen tomorrow, I would fall to my knees to give thanks to God for such a career.

If money was my only motivation, I would organize myself differently.

I have always studied my parts with the orchestral score and not with the piano reduction.

But I won't deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

Singing becomes a form of therapy.

The public is a part of my real life.

I feel like a little boy who is constantly offered new toys.

I then realized that I could never be satisfied again with the mere natural charm of my voice, that I had to constantly paint when singing, melting all the colors, expressing reds and blacks that had to be less primary but bursting with subtly colored combinations.

When facing symphonic orchestras which have played some works five thousands times, you have nothing to do.

The press regularly proclaims my ambitions and my financial demands.

Don't you think it astonishing that, at 58, I am still working at improving my career?

Between parts I was too old for and roles that were too overwhelming, out of reach then for my voice. I carved out a niche with the Wagnerian repertoire since I am attracted by its theatrical intensity.

When working with an orchestra, you never spend more than 20 minutes per recording session.

The high note is not the only thing.

I will prove that a great conducting career is expecting me.

The public made me and then encouraged me for many years, and my future even now depends upon it.

Honestly, if the public still wants to hear me in some works, I have to go down a half step.

Young singers are much better educated musically, much better informed, through discs and videos, than I was.

I attended less than two years of Conservatory in Mexico City.

When I was a young man, I was a baritone, very far from possessing the whole range of the tenor then.

It is strange, but nobody is shocked when pop singers make a fortune in the space of two years.

This season, over eight productions, I am presenting four young tenors.

On the other hand, I have devoted so much energy to reach the top that I accept the stress of being there.

The voice collects and translates your bad physical health, your emotional worries, your personal troubles.

I am never wrong when it comes to my possibilities.

We all have a destiny in accordance with the breadth of our shoulders. My shoulders are broad.

I feel at home in an orchestral score.

This circus games aspect has existed since the beginning of my career.

The atmosphere of the theater is my oxygen.

When a young artist is ready, one has to bring him into the limelight.

Every three days on average, I am alone on stage, facing the public.

Smoking Cigars is like falling in love. First you are attracted by its shape you stay for its flavor and you must always remember never never to let the flame go out

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.

My father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

The Philippines-U.S. Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement takes our security cooperation to a higher level of engagement, reaffirms our country's commitment to mutual defense and security, and promotes regional peace and stability.

If we can employ free market principles, we can help everyone.

I like science fiction. I took all the accelerated classes in school. I'm kind of a dork.

In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology.

Trudeau claims he's wary about Chinese espionage, but also says there's nothing wrong with Chinese state-owned enterprises buying up as much of Canada's resource sector as it likes.

Fur is only of use to the animal that wears it.