[Having played two pieces of music to Father Vogel, who does not recognize either] Antonio Salieri: Can you remember no melody of mine? I was the most famous composer in Europe. I wrote 40 operas alone! [suddenly inspired] Antonio Salieri: Here, what...
Grant glanced down at his khaki jacket. Since he’d slipped on the US Navy uniform in Agent Bounter’s office, he’d felt a confident swagger possess him. His spine lengthened, and his shoulders retracted. He should’ve been wearing this every da...
In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political argum...
When I write a song and come up with an arrangement and a vocal part, it's always a challenge trying to find a singer who can interpret it sort of the way that I hear it, and it's a very difficult thing to do. I mean, singing is like playing an instr...
Dave and I had been song writers in Nashville, trying to get around, out hustling, trying to meet people. We randomly met Hillary out in town one night. She said she was a singer. I asked her if she would like to write some songs with Dave and me, an...
I like Adele, Mika, Natacha Atlas and a beautiful old record, 'An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskouri,' starring Harry Belafonte and Nana Mouskouri. What they have in common is they all have incredible voices. I am very much into voices. I would say I'm...
When I sing along with Britney Spears I will sing in an American accent. But eventually I found my own voice. My songs are so brutally honest, it would be alien to sing in any accent other than my own. Don't get me wrong - I can imitate singers. I ca...
I'm just glad that I'm the musical equivalent of a character actress, because blues singers can keep singing and having an audience at 35, and someone like Madonna's gonna have to find something else to do, 'cos I don't care how pointy those bras are...
Young Noah: [humming] Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Young Allie: [laughing] You're a terrible singer. Young Noah: I know. Young Allie: [laying her head on his shoulder] But I like this song. [they continue dancing in the...
My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahes...
Alvy Singer: Oh my God, she's right. Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was beautiful, she was willing. She was real intelligent. Is it the old Groucho Marx joke that I'm - I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like m...
Annie Hall: Alvy, you're incapable of enjoying life, you know that? I mean you're like New York City. You're just this person. You're like this island unto yourself. Alvy Singer: I can't enjoy anything unless everybody is. If one guy is starving some...
When I saw Adele, I thought: 'I'll give it an hour before people say I was her,' just because I was fat. When you watch 'X Factor,' you can bet your bottom dollar, every single fat singer sounds like me as far as the judges are concerned. Can you ima...
I assume you are the sort of person who would go backstage after the opera in hopes of hearing the prima donna crying on the telephone, or walking in on the baritone fellating the basso buffo. I respect that-I was always the same way myself-though I ...
He had laid his head back until his scalp had contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor...
Choreographer Twyla Tharp, who directed the opera and dance scenes for the film Amadeus, has this to say about the film’s portrait of Mozart: There are no ‘natural’ geniuses… No-one worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight y...
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them,...
And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the u...
My Heart I'm not going to cry all the time nor shall I laugh all the time, I don't prefer one "strain" to another. I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie, not just a sleeper, but also the big, overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as aliv...
Gordie: Alright, alright, Mickey's a mouse, Donald's a duck, Pluto's a dog. What's Goofy? Vern: If I could only have one food for the rest of my life? That's easy-Pez. Cherry-flavored Pez. No question about it. Teddy: Goofy's a dog. He's definitely a...
[longer introduction to "Dance of the Hours"] Narrator: Now we're going to do one of the most famous and popular ballets ever written: the "Dance of the Hours" from Ponchielli's opera "La Gioconda". It's a pageant of the hours of the day. We see firs...
