Jessye Norman Quotes

My parents said to us, practically on a daily basis, that we were as good as anyone else on this earth, and that we would simply have to work harder in order to show that.

I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.

I wasn't born Austrian; I wasn't born German. My roots are from Africa, and I do not have any reason for not wanting to celebrate that. Every time that I can, I like to kind of mention it, you know, just to keep people sort of knowing exactly what's going on. My French is pretty good, but I'm still African, thank you very much.

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

There's no anger ever in a spiritual. There's always the dream of a hope of a better day coming. That God understands the troubles that I'm experiencing.

There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.

There is a lot of propaganda about opera singers not being able to act. That's not necessarily true and hasn't been true for a very long time. And certainly there were those instances when singers were told they need to fit into a certain size dress. Of course, women. Men? They just make the costume bigger.

I am deeply spiritual; I revel in those things that make for good - the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself ... Long live art, long live friendship, long live the joy of life!

I was given the opportunity to write the kind of book that I wanted to write, rather than one that catalogues where I sang and what I sang and what I wore. I wanted to write a book about an American family, the family that has produced me. The longer I live, the more I realise the incredible support and love we were given as children.

I didn't think at all as a young child that music would be my profession. It was just something that one did along with going to Brownies or going to church or going to school or anything else that one did in sort of one's very young life.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

I want to keep learning, keep exploring, keep doing more.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

We singers have a different level of responsibility from other musicians. We have words that we must convey; we have meanings that we must convey through these lyrics.

Pigeon-holes are only comfortable for pigeons.

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

I think that, certainly, most of my operatic roles are in German. I think it happened because, of course, I was lucky in that I was invited to sing, first of all, my operatic debut in Berlin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, which was West Berlin at the time.

The very best thing that could happen to a voice, if it shows any promise at all, is when it is very young to leave it alone and to let it develop quite naturally, and to let the person go on as long as possible with the sheer joy of singing.

I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn't very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris.

I sing in Hungarian. I read Hungarian. I do not pretend to speak Hungarian, but I sing in languages that I have studied as languages. And I find that to be central and very, very helpful. I think if you're not really cognizant of what every single word means, I think that might be a little tricky.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

I would like to see more African-American singers as part of our opera companies. If you take music and the arts out of the public schools, then you're going to lose a lot of people that you might have discovered were talented, very early.

I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.

I am the proud and humble recipient of more than 30 honorary doctorate degrees.

I try to frighten my very young colleagues into studying and understanding their voices before they attempt things that are beyond them. It's wise to take gymnastics and swimming to strengthen the body, because people don't realise what an athletic undertaking singing actually is.

I am not one to equate dress size and artistic performance.

As for my voice, it cannot be categorised - and I like it that way, because I sing things that would be considered in the dramatic, mezzo or spinto range.

I'm a sloucher, sort of, when nobody's looking.