“It’s easier for me to sit with the producers and the writers and I give them my feelings and my thoughts and what I think I feel like singing about and then they go away and write it.”

Being a parent is very important to me.

I want to live in Paris for a couple of years. I’m dying to do the Josephine Baker story. I really want to be there and do it. It’s certainly my intention to do it.

I just appreciate still having the longevity that I’ve had in my career.

I have three girls, and I say the same thing to them. I’m not involved in their careers because I’ve learned that it’s important for them to stand on their own two feet. They’ll feel better and prouder of themselves if they do.

The first time I heard a Billie Holiday record, I thought, ‘What’s so great about Billie Holiday?’

I know that my fans want to know who I’m sleeping with, but it’s really none of their business.

If I’m with a man I’m soft and buttery.

It takes a long time to get to be a diva. I mean, you gotta work at it.

I don’t judge people by their sexual orientation or the color of their skin, so I find it really hard to identify someone by saying that they’re a gay person or a black person or a Jewish person.

I don’t care about vacations. I go away and I come back real quick because I like my work. I really like my work to consume me.

I’m not really a songwriter – I’m an interpreter. So in a sense I am an actress first and foremost. I act out the songs, and I lead with my heart.

It has always been, and still is, my intention to build a playground in Central Park.

One thing you cannot control is nature.

My travels led me to where I am today. Sometimes these steps have felt painful, difficult, but led me to greater happiness and opportunities.

When I’m working I actually forget to eat. I don’t eat sweets because I don’t care about them. I have no real secrets. I just realize that as I get older I should stay strong so I exercise more.

My problem is that people have been writing books about me.A lot of things that people write about you are incorrect, but you don’t fight about it.

Joy, feeling one’s own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.

Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don’t have as much to sell.

When the supply increases, the prices soften. When prices fall, some mines with higher production costs will shut down as they become unviable.

At Indy, we are the NASA of the production-car world, and that’s clearly why manufacturers are involved – it’s such a good testbed.

We rest our case on the production numbers.

The prevailing – and foolish – attitude is that a good manager can be a good manager anywhere, with no special knowledge of the production process he’s managing.