“When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I’m slipping.”

I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not a devil, either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged.

I don’t need the money, dear. I work for art.

Only when I was singing did I feel loved.

I cannot switch my voice. My voice is not like an elevator going up and down.

When the curtain rises, the only thing that speaks is courage.

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.

The enemy was anyone who was someone he wanted to be or who had anything he wanted to have.

I do not love a man, except I hate his vices, because those vices are the enemies, and the destruction of that friend whom I love.

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one’s enemy only when his back is turned?

What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.

In the city that the wolf enters, enemies will be close by. An alien force will sack a great country. Allies will cross the mountains and the borders.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Instead of loving your enemies, have no enemies to love.

There is an art to science, and a science in art; the two are not enemies, but different aspects of the whole.