A Quote by Rufus Wainwright

Writing an opera and premiering in England, you could say I was going right into the eye of the storm and I came out successfully. A little tattered and bruised, but so what, I made it.
I look at basketball as like a storm. But it's the eye of the storm. The calmest place of it is to be right in the eye of it. And that's what basketball is for me; it's my eye. And while everything else around me is going on,' he continued, 'the destruction and things like that, basketball keeps me calm.
Premiering a new opera is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do, and opening nights of any opera are always pretty stressful.
If a little flower could speak, it seems to me that it would tell us quite simply all that God has done for it, without hiding any of its gifts. It would not, under the pretext of humility, say that it was not pretty, or that it had not a sweet scent, that the sun had withered its petals,or the storm bruised its stem, if it knew that such were not the case.
The eye of the hurricane forms as air rotates up and out of the hurricane and some of the air that's being spun out of the top of the storm sinks back into the center. This keeps the eye of the storm relatively calm and clear.
And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
I grew up in a little town in Minnesota, 500 people. I went out to Princeton, and I wasn't very well-accepted out there by the fancy folks of Princeton University, I felt. I came away bruised and feeling rejected.
City came in strongly for me, put their cards on the table, and what I have found out since is that every game in England is a privilege - the atmosphere, the fans, the interest that surrounds it. Every time I go out on the pitch, I know I've made the right decision.
That cactus went right through my eye. It left my eye flat. They took me to a doctor, and he said, 'We'll have to take the eye out.' ...I fought like a tiger. I said, 'No! Leave the eye alone. I am sure it will grow back.' The doctor said, 'You're too young to know.' ...But in a year's time that fluid came back, and that eye is just as good as the other one today.
[Opera] does not call so much for an imaginative ear as for an imaginative eye, an eye which can see beyond little absurdities toward great truths.
I cross my arms. "It was a two minute conversation." "I don't think a smaller time frame makes it less unwise." He furrows his eyebrows and touches the corner of my bruised eye with his fingertips. My head jerks back, but he doesn't take his hand away. Instead he sighs. "You know, if you could just learn to attack first, you might do better." "Attack first?" I say. "How will that help?" "You're fast. If you can get a few good hits in before they know what's going on, you could win." He shrugs, and his hand falls.
I have never called myself an opera singer. Other people do, but I always call myself a classical singer. I'd love to do opera, but I'm still too young and I don't want to do it until I'm ready. I realise that when I do that it's going to be... up for discussion, shall we say, so I want to get it right.
And so my child and I came to this place to meet him eye to eye and face to face. He made my daughter laugh, then we embraced. We never knew what friends we had, until we came to Leningrad.
The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I'm charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see 'Die Fledermaus', for instance. I've never done any of this, by the way. I've never written about one opera since I've had this job.
Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.
When assumptions were made that I was going to bail out there was a little part of my brain that thought 'I am going to do to prove them wrong'. In the end that wouldn't be coming from my heart and doing what was right.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!