Kiri Te Kanawa Quotes

For me, few things are more compelling than watching a great opera.

I think it's important for every artist to have that ballad that stands the test of time.

All the buzz can be very much here today and gone tomorrow, but my focus is creating music that will last forever.

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavour. The beauty endures. A work of art lives...through the generations and centuries.

Years from now, after I'm gone, someone will listen to what I've done and know I was here. They may not know or care who I was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me.

I want 'Rent' to last forever.

My worry is that opera will become an historic art form as opposed to a living, breathing thing.

What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don't have, because our work is lasting; it's there forever to view.

I want to make music that stands the test of time.

When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of music.

Opera is given so little attention in the national press.

When I was very little, I was sort of consumed by a love for opera. Weirdly enough, I went from being really enthusiastic about construction vehicles at the age of seven to being really passionate about 'La Traviata' by the time I was eight.

We used to listen to all the marvelous operas on records. Music was a very important part of our lives.

I love opera so much. I would never go back to doing it, but I love to listen - I'm grateful for it.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

My father's an opera nut, and my stepmother used to work at the Metropolitan Opera, so I had a lot of opera immersion. I like the grandness and pretention of it.

I don't want my music to be of its time; I want it to be timeless.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, “I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work.

Growing up in a family that listened to almost nothing but classical music had its effects, as well. "California Über Alles," the first Dead Kennedys single, was inspired musically more by Japanese Kabuki than anything else.

Whenever I go to an opera, I leave my sense and reason at the door with my half-guinea, and deliver myself up to my eyes and my ears.

They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers-people who do not know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.

If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world it is to your country [Italy] its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.

Remember, pain is temporary; film is forever.