Anna Netrebko Quotes

As a singer, it's basic to preserve what I like to do, which is music, and also to remember my cradlesongs in Spanish.

It's very strange how electronic music formatted itself and forgot that its roots are about the surprise, freedom, and the acceptance of every race, gender, and style of music into this big party. Instead, it started to become this electronic lifestyle which also involved the glorification of technology.

You have to open your mind. I like the ability to express myself in a deep way. It's the closest music to our humanity - it's like a folk music that rises up out of a culture.

I know my own heart to be entirely English.

The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.

I am an Israeli-born American citizen.

I've always felt very English.

I'm not American. I still have my Japanese citizenship.

I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it.

I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.

I have a British passport, but the rest of my family have Indian passports, and I am Indian.

I'm first and foremost an Irishman, by birth, by nature, by soul, but an American citizen through and through as well.

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.

I am a man by nature and a Frenchman only by accident.

Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty .... If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.

The question really isn't whether I'm American, Russian, Iranian, Azerbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them

A nation is not a linguistic unit. The English-speaking peoples, whether under the Union Jack or not, are, with one exception, not English; neither are the German-speaking Swiss and Austrians German, nor the French-speaking Swiss and Belgians and Canadians French.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one reason I was interested in people who feel compelled to mask their origins and thereby circumvent the restrictions.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

I do not deny my German identity. But I also feel Swiss. Of my eight great-grandparents, seven were born Swiss. I have been living in Switzerland for more than 50 years.

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

Who does get to claim Americanness? You know, my brother was born in this country. And is he seen as American? So, I mean, it brings up a lot of interesting questions.

When I became an American citizen, nothing's changed because I'm still Asian.