We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in the mirror, stick out our chests, suck in our bellies, and say, 'Damn, we're Americans,' and smile.
“It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.”
“Learn to do common things uncommonly well; we must always keep in mind that anything that helps fill the dinner pail is valuable.”