Renee Fleming Quotes

When a human being without amplification makes a sound that is high and loud, it is almost unworldly.

We are unique, each human voice, not because we are completely self-generated, but because of who we choose to assemble the countless factors that made us.

Fostering creativity in children is as important as any other part of the school curriculum because it feeds the soul. A daily dose of creativity helps children imagine a better world and then create it.

The reason that some singers go on to become great artists has very little to do with their voices, but rather with the fact that they have used their instruments as tools for detailed communication.

An interpretation exists because of what we find between the notes.

Everybody's a work in progress. I'm a work in progress. I mean, I've never arrived. I'm still learning all the time.

I don't want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don't achieve nearly what I want.

We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul, and, most important, the gut.

Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to emotions I could barely name, and how it enables me to give my voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.

I cannot imagine a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing.

Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year-and those are days you won't be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.

The student's job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating.

I have a noble history of being rejected by a lot of places, only to discover that the one that finally lets me in is in fact the perfect fit.

The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get out of it.

So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don't do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.

It is our responsibility to learn how to speak to an audience that is less informed about music, to give it a reason to want to come and see us instead of going to the movies.

There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.

In a sense, it's less about seeing how high up I can vault than about seeing how deeply I can explore my potential...Ambition for me is about the willingness to work, the ability to mine my own soul fearlessly.

Perfection often creates such a flawless surface that there's no place for the audience to enter into a piece, while the idiosyncrasies of individual style are like windows into the singer's heart.

Music was language in our house. It was air.....I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.

Among the important realizations I had in my own days in the practice room was that if any one route to any one phrase didn't work after days of trying, then the exact opposite route should at least be explored, as well as every alternative in between, as counterintuitive as that often seemed.

I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

I am so envious of my colleagues from 100 years ago who only sang new works, they hardly ever sang revivals.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.