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

People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.
Bryn Terfel

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
Bobby McFerrin

Sleep is an excellent way of listening to an opera.
James Stephens

So, I lived at the Beijing Opera, I ate there, I learned a craft. And the money we made went into the company.
John Lone

Soap opera wouldn't be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.
Joe Lando

Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
Mason Cooley

Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.
Wim Wenders

That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.
Gunther Schuller

That was my way, and I also use the music after five years, I started hearing opera, opera, it was very good instrument to keep the spirit very strong because you feel like you are yourself singing opera, and I used to hear a lot of opera, they send me tapes.
Mordechai Vanunu

The cynical part of the answer is that I expect to see a good deal more space opera, set far enough in the future as to be disconnected from contemporary issues.
John M. Ford

The first rule in opera is the first rule in life: see to everything yourself.
Nellie Melba

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.
Bruce Beresford

The opera always loses money. That's as it should be. Opera has no business making money.
Rudolf Bing

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.
Cleveland Amory

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
Jean de la Bruyere

The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.
H. L. Mencken