Sourced

• No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
  • W. H. Auden, in TIME magazine (29 December 1961)

Unsourced

• The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
  • Harrison Birtwistle

• Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
  • Ed Gardner

• Opera is an 18th- and 19th-century art that must find a 20th-century audience.
  • Goeran Gentele

• If you put together all the ingredients that naturally attract children — sex, violence, revenge, spectacle and vigorous noise — what you have is grand opera.
  • Judith Martin

• Because I want to do a piece about real people! And I want to set it in a real place! A boudoir! — because that to me is the most exciting place on earth. Underclothes on the floor! Sheets still warm from a woman’s body! A pisspot brimming under the bed!
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as portrayed in Amadeus by Peter Shaffer

• There are shrinking audiences for opera. Things are not going well, and the support has to be at the base, not the top, of the pyramid. Nonetheless, we continue to willfully exclude the public. People hide behind phrases such as 'dumbing down' as a way of avoiding the fact that this thing we care about is becoming more and more isolated.
  • Graham Vick