I walk an 11-minute mile without huffing and puffing.

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

Pigeon-holes are only comfortable for pigeons.

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

My arias make me take off as if I were on a trampoline.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

There's no anger ever in a spiritual. There's always the dream of a hope of a better day coming. That God understands the troubles that I'm experiencing.

There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

I want to sing more in Spanish. I want to sing the songs of Granados; the songs of Montsalvatge. To do things that truly I've not done before.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

If you wish to be a writer– then write, and don’t allow anyone to tell you that you’re on the ‘wrong’ path. You know where you’re going, and each word you write gets you a step closer.

He who does not get fun and enjoyment out of every day ... needs to reorganize his life.

My opinion of mankind is founded upon the mournful fact that, so far as I can see, they find within themselves the means of believing in a thousand times as much as there is to believe in.

We believe in fair exchange rates and Japan doesn't practice that. They have massive U.S. dollar reserves, and they use them to intervene regularly.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end - to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared. . .

Avoid studies of which the result dies with the worker.

I strongly urge students to learn to take risks, to be bold, to let their genius convert that fear into power and brilliance.

Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds.