The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne.

You can't sing baritone when you're a soprano.

I was champion soprano of Sussex when I was 16!

My mother had a great voice. Not like mine, not like my sister's, not like my son's - a high soprano voice, but like a bird. I mean, really beautiful.

I wasn't the best in my class at the Royal Academy. There was a really good soprano and baritone who were technically better and are doing really well in opera now. But I was definitely the best mezzo-soprano in my class, because I was the only one of those!

I love to sing. I'm a soprano.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

Shortly after this I was made a member of the boys' choir, it being found that I possessed a clear, strong soprano voice. I enjoyed the singing very much.

The nature of television is that it's a beast with a lot of opinions. I don't consider myself typecast any more than Neil Patrick Harris was as Doogie Howser or James Gandolifini is as Tony Soprano.

I used to lie in bed and imagine I was performing at the Albert Hall, not that I'd ever been there. I took lessons with a German teacher when I was quite young. But it turned out I had a very high soprano voice, which I didn't like at all.

I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'

Lilliet Berne, La Generale, newly returned to Paris after a year spent away, the Falcon soprano whose voice was so delicate it was rumored she endangered it even by speaking, her silences as famous as her performances.

A soprano's voice is a little like a mother's cry, which is why it attracts all human beings.

I certainly know all about the Jersey jokes that amuse the rest of the country. You've probably heard them. Our state bird is the mosquito. Our state tree is dead. It doesn't help that we are represented on television by Tony Soprano and 'Jersey Shore.'

I remember at the age of, and I'll say this, 10 and a half, 11, I had a natural boy soprano.

My high-school a cappella teacher would embarrass me in front of the choir. 'Mavis, you're in the basement. Mavis, you're singing with the boys.' I said, 'Mr. Finch, my voice isn't soprano. I can't sing up there with the girls.' So I just got out of the choir.

Nobody was playing the soprano saxophone and certainly nobody was trying to do anything with it. So I was all alone. I didn't know that at first.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

Being lectured by the president on fiscal responsibility is a little bit like Tony Soprano talking to me about law and order in this country.

The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.