“It’s true that I have a very healthy ego; anybody who creates does.”

I don’t like talking about myself and I don’t like talking about the work.

I remember when I was 5 living on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn, the hallway of our building had a brass banister and a great sound, a great echo system. I used to sing in the hallway.

My nose was part of my heritage, and if I had talent to sing and to act, why wasn’t that enough?

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.

The minute you start compromising for the sake of massaging somebody’s ego, that’s it, game over.

Darkness is an absence of light. Ego is an absence of awareness.

Love in its purest form is a sharing of joy. It asks nothing in return, it expects nothing. Love is a spiritual phenomenon; lust is physical. Ego is psychological; love is spiritual.

There’s only one rule you need to remember: laugh at everything and forget everybody else! It sounds egotistical, but it’s actually the only cure for those suffering from self-pity.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

Body is purified by water. Ego by tears. Intellect is purified by knowledge. And soul is purified with love.

A man`s ego is just as fragile as a woman`s heart.