The purpose of art is to make the world a better place.

Opera is a way of living life to the fullest, a way of expressing emotions that cannot be expressed in any other way.

And what I noted, since the really big ideas carry 95 percent of the freight, it wasn’t at all that hard for me to pick up all the big ideas and all the big disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, they are no good if you don’t practice. You don’t practice, you lose it.