“I loved the photographs of people wearing elaborate makeup and costumes – they really pulled at me inside. I was in that library every week for years, until I was about 13. I had a rich interior life, because I didn’t have much of a social life.”

Just because people don’t meet you doesn’t mean they’re not out there breaking their asses trying to get around.

My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.

My parents have not insisted that we go to college, but she wanted us to learn. Teacher, librarian, secretary, nurse. All my siblings were employed. But I wanted to be the boss, an independent contractor.

Cherish forever what makes you unique, ‘cuz you’re really a yawn if it goes.

When I started in this [music] business, I had a dream, but it was amorphous, and I had no experience. I just had a fuzzy notion of what life would be like if I became what I pictured.

The only thing Madonna will ever do like a virgin is give birth in a stable.

Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.

Make sure your life is a rare entertainment! It doesn’t take anything drastic. You needn’t be gorgeous or wealthy or smart, just very enthusiastic!

I’m the last of the truly tacky women. I do trash with flash and sleaze with ease.

I’ve always been lucky enough to have great audiences. It has been quite a life.

[On Princess Anne:] Such an active, outdoorsy lass. She loves nature in spite of what it did to her.

My daughter very independent. But if she’s upset about something, she will absolutely let me know. She’s great – a real tough cookie.

Cats always seem so very wise, when staring with their half-closed eyes. Can they be thinking, I’ll be nice, and maybe she will feed me twice?

If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it?

I always wanted to be a performer, I didn’t know exactly what kind of performer, all I knew was there were certain things that I liked. I liked movies a whole lot, and I loved music.

Where did I do well?” When I did this assessment of my life, I said to myself, “It was really good.”

I read my books aloud before they were published.

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men.

Conflict resolution,’ said Nightingale. ‘Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.

When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there.

I was given some Harry Potter books by a young friend. I wanted to know why young people liked it so much. And I noted that there were some values in Harry Potter that are common to many books that are popular all over the world. In the end,

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

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.

I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.