Independence was a big, big thing for me. I saw my voice as a way out - when my parents fought, I'd run up to my room, put on The Sound of Music, open the window and sing out. My voice was my escape.

I'm an ocean, because I'm really deep. If you search deep enough you can find rare exotic treasures.

So, where's the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?

The female body is something that's so beautiful. I wish women would be proud of their bodies and not diss other women for being proud of theirs.

You can never be too perfect, too thin, too curvy. I'm very confident and happy with my body.

I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl.

I don't think there is such a thing as being too raunchy when it comes to the art form of burlesque.

There was no way in hell I was going to jeopardize my baby for my show.

Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?

I remember watching the Grammys and looking at the performances and crying to my mom, saying how much I wanted to be there.

To interrupt the writer from the line of thought is to wake the dreamer from the dream. The dreamer cannot enter that dream, precisely as it was unfolding, ever again.

The instruction received at the mother's knee, and the paternal lessons, together with the pious and sweet souvenirs of the fireside, are never effaced entirely from the soul.

Fortunately the family is a human institution: humans made it and humans can change it.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.

I was a carpenter for a time and everybody watches what you do.

Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.

You can only recognize your happiness against the background of suffering.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Lobbyists have more offices in Washington than the President. You see, the President only tells Congress what they should do. Lobbyists tell'em what they will do.