Music - opera particularly - is a process which is endurable or successful only if it is achieved by people who love to collaborate.
Sarah Caldwell

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it's music, not words, that provides power.
Marcel Marceau

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Wole Soyinka

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden

Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
Graeme Murphy

Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while.
William Bolcom

Of all the noises known to man, opera is the most expensive.
Moliere

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.
Gioachino Rossini

One of the most wonderful memories in my life was when I sang at the Opera House in Sydney. I will never forget that. It is one of the most beautiful Houses I have ever sung in my life.
Nana Mouskouri

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
Lesley Garrett

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Terry Prachett

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
H. L. Mencken

Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.
Luciano Pavarotti

Opera is credible drama now, and it costs less than going to a football match. What have you got to lose?
Lesley Garrett

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.
Carlisle Floyd

Opera is one of the most important art forms. It should be listened to and appreciated by everyone.
Luciano Pavarotti

Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings.
Robert Burns

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
Kenneth Clark

Opera? Just what the world needs: more fat women screaming.
Peter Boyle

People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it.
Noel Coward