I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
Well, I think part of my gift, or if I have one, is that I love listening.
In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.
It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.
The values transmitted through oral history are many - courage, selflessness, the ability to endure, and to do so with humor and grace. I got those values listening to my dad's stories about the Depression and how their family survived. It gave me courage that I, too, could survive hard times.
I think my first musical memory is actually listening to Billie Holiday. I think I must have been, like, 3 or 4 years old.
I'm a real music fan, so I listen to all kinds of music all the time. I listen to a lot of what my friends or people I know are listening to. I'm always checking out new bands.
I majored in psychology, and I still love listening to people's problems.
I write while listening to music, mostly because the world beyond my headphones is too chaotic.
I was 8 years old when I started listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bad Company and Led Zeppelin.
I've learned to set boundaries and know when to say, 'I just need to rest.' I'm good at listening to what my body's telling me.
Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them.
Those old adages - you attract more with honey; do unto others - are true. You can get attention by being acerbic or mean or making a bizarre comment. But by being nice, being empathetic, building relationships and listening, people begin to recognize that you're thoughtful and respectful of their position.
Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.
Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories.
Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes.
I mean my point as an artist is I'm on my own little weird journey across the sky here and whether or not anybody's listening, or listening to the degree I would like them to, at the end of the day has to be an inconsequential thing because I can't chase this culture.
I grew up listening in awe to stories of their wartime adventures. My granny, Joan, was a journalist and wrote amazing letters to my grandpa when he was a prisoner of war, while my nana, Mary, was a Land Girl, then a Wren. They were so independent, resilient and glamorous.
Recorded engine sounds, however, are a deliberate deception. They're like going to a concert and listening to a recording. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind buying a BMW recording and installing it in my '96 Jeep Cherokee.
There's nothing worse - I don't like listening to actors talk about the process, especially when - I mean, for me I've played a lot of guys, dudes, boys in a sense and this was a challenge for me just to play that official character.
An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.
One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say.
I've been musically inclined since I picked up an instrument in the fourth grade. I just really appreciate music. I love to listen to it; I love to sing. I wouldn't consider myself, like, a natural singer. I just developed it over time, honestly, just listening. I'm a great listener to music.
I enjoy listening to classical music and heavy metal. I play basketball and try to go diving at least once a year. I don't really have hobbies in the traditional sense... I engage in too many activities already through the actions of my characters.
Never stop listening to people at all levels of the company. Be physically out and about so that you always have your finger on the pulse and know, at the ground level, the truth of how people are feeling.
I'm not performing now. What I do now is listen to music all day long. Listening is very nourishing to me. I might go back to perform, I might make another record. I've got a record half finished.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Most Australians who've got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies.
My whole life is geared to play guitar. I play what I want when I want and I hope the listener gets as much pleasure listening to the music as I get playing it.
We're looking to help our guitar buddies do their thing while at the same time we try to create something we might enjoy listening to ourselves. If anything we are trying to develop a vocabulary so we can converse more fluidly.
The audience plays a huge part in how a piece will actually form. They really allow the performers to walk a tightrope in a way that never seems to happen in the privacy of your own four walls. I'm listening to the audience, and they're listening to me.
One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.
I grew up in New Mexico, and the older I get, I have less need for contemporary culture and big cities and all the stuff we are bombarded with. I am happier at my ranch in the middle of nowhere watching a bug carry leaves across the grass, listening to silence, riding my horse, and being in open space.
We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
I write stories that are already in the air, and I think it's important to have the correct listening device to tune in to that frequency.
Oh man, I love what the South brings as far as the soul, and I really have noticed from even the early days of listening to OutKast and Goodie Mob that Atlanta and the South has a diverse sound to it. You have bounce music. You have soulful musicians. You have artists with vocals who try to do different things.
