“Women are not pals enough with men, so we must make ourselves indispensable. After all, we have the greatest weapon in our hands by just being women.”

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil’s means; great teachers foresee a pupil’s ends.

Love is so much better when you are not married.

It’s a terrible thing to go through life thinking that you have a rock on your side when you haven’t.

I was always too mature for my age – and not very happy. I had no young friends. I wish I could go back to those days. If I could only live it all again, how I would play and enjoy other girls. What a fool I was.

Don’t talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddam rules.

I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best.

I will not be sued! I have the voice of an angel!

ART is domination. It’s making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours.

I want to be a mature artist with a different kind of thinking.

The public is a monster and that is why I am not eager to return to the stage.

Paris dictates fashion to the whole world.

There must be a law against forcing children to perform at an early age. Children should have a wonderful childhood. They should not be given too much responsibility.

I don’t know what happens to me on stage. Something else seems to take over.

On stage, I am in the dark.

An opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera house.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

My friends they were dancing here in the streets of Huntsville when our first satellite orbited the Earth. They were dancing again when the first Americans landed on the Moon. I’d like to ask you, don’t hang up your dancing slippers.

My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.

Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy.

Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.

We don’t make friends anymore, we add them nowadays.

My dear friend, clear your mind of can’t.