Top 70 Renee Fleming Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year-and those are days you won’t be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.”

— Renee Fleming

2. “Fostering creativity in children is as important as any other part of the school curriculum because it feeds the soul. A daily dose of creativity helps children imagine a better world and then create it.”

— Renee Fleming

3. “Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to emotions I could barely name, and how it enables me to give my voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.”

— Renee Fleming

4. “I’m lucky – I can do two things at once.”

— Renee Fleming

5. “In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.”

— Renee Fleming

6. “Well, any time Im preparing for a performance or even a rehearsal, its as if in a way, like any other athletes, these are muscles that support the vocal cords which are just I believe cartilage. It demands a kind of constant warming up and a constant feeling of where is the voice today.”

— Renee Fleming

7. “The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get out of it.”

— Renee Fleming

8. “No voice teacher can be all things to all people. You have to gain information from whatever sources you can. You have to listen.”

— Renee Fleming

9. “My philosophy is that the people around us are there doing as much work if not more work behind the scenes and they’re the last people you would ever be unkind to, so I hope I’m not a diva off stage.”

— Renee Fleming

10. “My mother was the worst kind of stage mother. She would make me and my younger sister and brother little duckling costumes and put us in kiddie shows.”

— Renee Fleming

11. “I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.”

— Renee Fleming

12. “I’ve spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.”

— Renee Fleming

13. “I think opera has gained a kind of glamorous appeal. It’s a live performance that aligns all of the arts, and when it is represented in the media, in film in particular, it is presented as something that is really a special event, whether it’s a great date or something that’s just hugely romantic.”

— Renee Fleming

14. “While it’s a fact that a voice begins with natural talent, any talent must be nurtured, cajoled, wrestled with pampered, challenged, and, at every turn, examined.”

— Renee Fleming

15. “I have had a very difficult time with stage fright; it undermines your well-being and peace of mind, and it can also threaten your livelihood.”

— Renee Fleming

16. “My worry is that opera will become an historic art form as opposed to a living, breathing thing.”

— Renee Fleming

17. “I have a noble history of being rejected by a lot of places, only to discover that the one that finally lets me in is in fact the perfect fit.”

— Renee Fleming

18. “Perfection often creates such a flawless surface that there’s no place for the audience to enter into a piece, while the idiosyncrasies of individual style are like windows into the singer’s heart.”

— Renee Fleming

19. “I do everything in the third person. Performance is about being someone else.”

— Renee Fleming

20. “I would love to do more private concerts.”

— Renee Fleming

21. “A lot of bad behavior in singers is caused by nerves.”

— Renee Fleming

22. “For years, I had no time for exploratory travel.”

— Renee Fleming

23. “I think singing is one of the most natural things that human beings do, but it’s difficult.”

— Renee Fleming

24. “An interpretation exists because of what we find between the notes.”

— Renee Fleming

25. “I’ve lived in New York all my life, and we went to the Mormon Pageant each year in upstate New York. It still is a wonderful production. I remember going and seeing the performance and listening to the music. My father had Mormon Tabernacle Choir music, and we would listen to it and sing with it.”

— Renee Fleming

26. “I cannot imagine a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing.”

— Renee Fleming

27. “You finally have to learn to pull all the different kinds of teaching and training and coaching together on you own, so that your voice and body and technique for a sound that is consistent and solid.”

— Renee Fleming

28. “The first thing I did when I made a little bit of money as a singer was to buy myself an amber necklace. This is often the way we put together our lives, adding the striking qualities of others into our own character.”

— Renee Fleming

29. “I was always a very good student.”

— Renee Fleming

30. “I have a certain image that’s more classic, and I’m happy to stay out of the fray.”

— Renee Fleming

31. “One of my timesaving habits is to save all of my magazines and junk mail for airplane trips. I walk on the plane with a very heavy bundle, but by the time the trip is over, it can all be thrown away.”

— Renee Fleming

32. “When a human being without amplification makes a sound that is high and loud, it is almost unworldly.”

— Renee Fleming

33. “If I have to hold a note for a long time, I imagine it as moving and spinning, for the note has to have life. In a way, a singer actually refreshes a note with every beat that it’s held.”

— Renee Fleming

34. “Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.”

— Renee Fleming

35. “I’m reserved, so I’ve always needed to find a way of opening up. Jazz helped me do that.”

— Renee Fleming

36. “Because everything about the voice interests me, I felt it would be fascinating to learn a completely different style of singing.”

— Renee Fleming

37. “I don’t want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don’t achieve nearly what I want.”

— Renee Fleming

38. “When I sing, the sound is a totally different range, color, all of it. It’s all about the breath. You take in a breath and you make a sound.”

— Renee Fleming

39. “I have not changed with the accomplishments. I’ve remained the same. If I had changed, great. You know, but I haven’t.”

— Renee Fleming

40. “The student’s job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating.”

— Renee Fleming

41. “I’m not a reactionary.”

— Renee Fleming

42. “Every singer eventually gets around to a Christmas disc.”

— Renee Fleming

43. “Singers can also get away with a lot based on youth, strength and enthusiasm, only to find ten years later that what was once just a niggling problem has brought their careers to an end.”

— Renee Fleming

44. “Contrary to the norm, as my technique improved my voice became higher.”

— Renee Fleming

45. “We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul, and, most important, the gut.”

— Renee Fleming

46. “I haven’t really been able to transfer into that extraordinarily other worldly creature, other than I hope on stage.”

— Renee Fleming

47. “So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don’t do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.”

— Renee Fleming

48. “Being steeped in the process of learning and exploring keeps me from becoming too nervous. Partly it’s about not getting bored.”

— Renee Fleming

49. “I want to keep my voice young, with nothing heavy.”

— Renee Fleming

50. “With classical singing you have to put out so much air – you project, you emit force.”

— Renee Fleming