After Bruno Walter, my career went in leaps and bounds. I have had 35 years of a career that is just incredible, and a wonderful time all over the world.

I was born in Montreal and came from a lower-middle-class family.

My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar.

I have had five phenomenal children, a great husband and, even though we are separated, we are good friends.

It makes one a better person to have had hardships and to have overcome hardships and not to blame anybody else for your mistakes.

Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.

Singing beautiful melodies is one thing, but to deliver the text so that the people understand it, even in a foreign language, has to be worked at very hard.

Another turn in my life happened when I took on the Canada Council.

I have been all over the world. I have met some wonderful people, lots of them very simple, whom nobody will ever hear about, but who have been fabulous to me.

I have three grandchildren and am hoping for 20.

If somebody asks me to recommend a young, good singer, I always do.

It's not like I'm all into nostalgia and history, it's just that I can't stand the way things are now

I have nothing against younger women and older men on screen. What is sad is that so many women over 40 who have so much to give aren't being considered to play opposite men their own age or younger.

Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue replacement.

The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

Juliana's a year older than me, but she sometimes seems younger - mostly because she's the opposite of cynical and I'm the opposite of the opposite of cynical.

A good marriage does not require a perfect man or a perfect woman. It only requires a man and a woman committed to strive together toward perfection.

In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.

I haven't given up on the possibility that sweet reason will prevail.

Sometimes it's not bad to hurt. Sometimes you don't want things until you get hurt. We got hurt today, let's see what we do.

How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?