“I feel like a million tonight – but one at a time.”

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.

People are not the best because they work hard. They work hard because they are the best.

The worst part of success is to try to find someone who is happy for you.

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?

Anyone who is steady in his determination for the advanced stage of spiritual realization and can equally tolerate the onslaughts of distress and happiness is certainly a person eligible for liberation.

This chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra is enacted from the spiritual platform and thus this sound vibration surpasses all lower strata of consciouness – namely sensual, mental and intellectual.

Other men have acquired fame by industry, but this man by indolence.

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

…and yet I am what they think I am.

People say that the soul, on hearing the song of creation, entered the body, but in reality the soul itself was the song.

I’ve exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars.

In the dream world of Matisse and the gritty reality of American frontier, the diversity of women in our society offers the chance for greater exploration and even greater inspiration.