“When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I’m slipping.”

That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil’s means; great teachers foresee a pupil’s ends.

Love is so much better when you are not married.

It’s a terrible thing to go through life thinking that you have a rock on your side when you haven’t.

I was always too mature for my age – and not very happy. I had no young friends. I wish I could go back to those days. If I could only live it all again, how I would play and enjoy other girls. What a fool I was.

Don’t talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddam rules.

I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best.

I will not be sued! I have the voice of an angel!

ART is domination. It’s making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours.

I want to be a mature artist with a different kind of thinking.

The public is a monster and that is why I am not eager to return to the stage.

Paris dictates fashion to the whole world.

There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. They should not be given too much responsibility.

I don’t know what happens to me on stage. Something else seems to take over.

On stage, I am in the dark.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.

Real friends are very special, but you have to be careful because sometimes you have a friend and you think they are made of rock, then suddenly you realise they’re only made of sand.

Men weren’t really the enemy – they were fellow victims suffering from an outmoded masculine mystique that made them feel unnecessarily inadequate when there were no bears to kill.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.

He passes through life most securely who has least reason to reproach himself with complaisance toward his enemies.

Courage, ne’er by sorrow broken! Aid where tears of virtue flow; Faith to keep each promise spoken! Truth alike to friend and foe!

I dread our own mistakes more than the enemy’s intentions.

knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.

A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.

The zeal of friends it is that razes me, And not the hate of enemies.