I can never remember being afraid of an audience. If the audience could do better, they'd be up here on stage and I'd be out there watching them.

At a flea market I always head for the junk jewelry table first.

I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me

At one time I smoked, but in 1959 I couldn't think of anything else to give up for Lent so I stopped - and I haven't had a cigarette since.

I've never cooked. I can't do much more in the kitchen than make a cup of tea and some toast.

Any audience that gets a laugh out of me gets it while I'm facing them

There's such a thing as theater discipline. One player doesn't appropriate another's inventions

Broadway has been very good to me. But then, I've been very good to broadway.

I can hold a note as long as the Chase National Bank.

I wouldn't change one thing about my professional life, and I make it a point not to dwell on my mistakes

When you are in deep conflict about something, sometimes the most trivial thing can tip the scales.

Nobody alive today can tell me how much I am worth. I change that everyday.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it.

That’s the thing about things. They tend to happen.

You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral.

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.

Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet.

What comes next? Super Mario 128? Actually, that's what I want to do.

She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.