“I read neither good nor bad about me. I let it not even in my life, so it has no effect on me. I am very sensitive.”

I hope to keep entertaining in some way until I can’t physically entertain any longer. It’s what I was born to do, and I love this profession.

One of my first role models was Eugene Lang, a wealthy businessman who went back to his elementary school in East Harlem and addressed the sixth-grade class. He looked out at that sea of faces and said, “If any of you wants to go to college, I will pay for it.”

The inventor of the modern foundation garment that we women wear today was a German scientist and opera lover by the name of Otto Titsling.

There’s the media-driven universe, in which the public perceives you in a superficial way. Then there’s the universe that you actually inhabit, where you have to get up even if you didn’t sleep so well, and you feel like crap and your face is swollen.

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’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.

My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.

Books are the basis; purity is the force; preaching is the essence; utility is the principle.

That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men.

As much as I read our story, I tried finding the conflict that our story had. I flipped the pages and ripped pages, looking for words that somehow kept our story going.