“It is every woman’s dream to be some man’s dream woman.”

I don’t know why it is that we need to denigrate, to knock down. It’s so sick.

When I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the neighborhood girls would sit on the stoop and sing. I was known as the kid who had a good voice and no father.

I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

I’d started going to acting classes at 14, played ‘Medea’ at 15 and really wanted to be a classical actress.

My mother never really thought I could become anything.

In the music business, we all do different things, but we sit there and admire other people who can write a song differently or sing differently. It’s not so competitive.

Being a woman in music was fine, but when I wanted to direct, I was poking my head into a man’s world.

I hate tooting my own horn, but after Steven Spielberg saw Yentl, he said: “I wish I could tell you how to fix your picture, but I can’t. It’s the best film I’ve seen since Citizen Kane”.

I am a nice person. I care about my driver having lunch, you know.

I’ll see a celadon green room in an 18th century New Hampshire house and just fall in love. Colors stay in my head.

I only began to sing because I couldn’t get a job as an actress.

I never sing in the shower either.

Doubt can motivate you, so don’t be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out.

A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. But a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion.

The audience is the barometer of the truth.

When I sing, people shut up.

As a general, and as a leader of this team, whatever I’ve got to do get my guys going I’ll do it every time. If I have to be the bad guy sometime, I’ll guess I’ll take that. That’s what a leader and a general and a chief of police does.

I’m dominant every night. I come in every night and get beat up.

Every time I am looking into the depths of somebody’s brain, I’m thinking, ‘This is what makes a person who they are. That structure contains memories. Everything that they’ve ever experienced is right in there.’

I can’t even give my father a proper gift. Every single Father’s Day means so much to me. I’m so close to him. He’s my big brother, but also my father.

So one of the most unique things on screen in American movies today is everyday behavior.

Every single one of us is the descendant of a go-getter. Of dreamers and of believers.

The Bulls talked to just about every person who ever met me.

We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.