In certain professions, you can love your profession; you can do it in a very professional way and do it wonderfully, but you do not have this possibility to communicate with others - I express myself singing, and I think this is a real luxury.

It is important to be passionate, but it is also important to combine the heart and the head. I have made mistakes in both my private and professional lives.

If I can do concert recitals, adapting the repertoire to my needs, then no problem, that's good enough. But with operas, unless the right circumstances come up, my career is done.

Music isn't only a profession.

It's an appeal as old as America and its presidency: This is an extraordinary country populated by hard-working, big-dreaming, freedom-loving people graced by God when they're not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.

I'll tell you, in my life I've never once have seen a Hispanic panhandler, because in our community, it would be viewed as shameful to be out on the street begging. Those are all conservative values - faith, family, hard work, responsibility.

Almost every time I am in a lectureship on a college campus, young people will say, If there is a God and if he is a loving and merciful God, how do you explain the problems of suffering and death and all the tragedies that happen to people?

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.