“Discipline is a necessary tool to help you get what you want in life. It forces you to stay on center and to move away from the things that are not necessary.”

I look forward to the future – and going into the studio to make new music.

My name, Diana Ross, is my name and nobody should be able to use that for exploitative purposes but me.

You can have a lot of New York and still see what’s going on in the rest of the world, I think – like in China.

I keep a great organiser, I try to keep my priorities in the right place.

I would like to enjoy my life a little bit more so I can really have more fun, but my work is my fun.

They tell me that it will be hard to find a man strong enough to love my own strength and independence, and not worry about being Mr. Diana Ross, but I disagree. I know absolutely that that man is somewhere out there.

I really don’t think that Detroit was any different than New York of Boston or Philadelphia. Kids always wanted to listen to music outside because that’s where they hung out with their friends.

I learned something from that. If someone asks me something that I really don’t want to do, I say no. I have to trust that. And I’m not afraid to talk money.

You can always tell where Diana Ross has been by the hair that’s left behind!

I’m a parent, and I try to take care of my health and keep my life in order. In the last few years I’ve really had to decide what’s important to me, and it seems to me that my family and my health are top on the list. And those have nothing to do with show business.

It’s easier for me to sit with the producers and the writers and I give them my feelings and my thoughts and what I think I feel like singing about and then they go away and write it.

Do you know where you going to? Do you like the things that life is showing you? Where are you going to? Do you know?

I think that if my voice for some reason changes – because your voice does change – then it’s time for me not to sing.

I’ve never been damaged or hurt by press. It’s just that I think it’s unfair to use your name in media.

My life has often been described as ‘from rags to riches’ but in fact, the Ross’s were never raggedy.

If I do an interview, then I take full responsibility. I figure I’m not going to talk to anyone that I think is unethical anyway.

Most people don’t walk around the tools to process pain and fear, that kind of discomfort. In most cases, it’s unbearable to look at it, feel it, and/or address it. It’s why I’m such a fan of self-help books.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

I have a thing for tools.

In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.

The true Mason never hesitates to use the working tools to correct personal flaws.

The true Mason’s level of discernment increases with every use of the working tools, because the true Mason is ever working on him/her self.

I’m sure drugs and alcohol perhaps would inspire new thoughts, but it’s certainly not something that I use as a tool or a mechanism to create.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.