"I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music."

"Every singer eventually gets around to a Christmas disc."

"I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It's a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it's a great date or something that's just hugely romantic."

"Being steeped in the process of learning and exploring keeps me from becoming too nervous. Partly it's about not getting bored."

"I don't think of it at the moment, but the roles that interest me are those of young people."

"As you think, so shall you become."

"There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face."

"I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn't go so well."