A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.

Leave the fireworks for those who cast no spark of their own.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] is as unique as she is timeless. Her story is classic Americana, and the strangest rags-to-riches saga you'll ever read; I like to call it Horatio Alger meets Tim Burton.

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism.

An amusing city, Chicago, any way you look at it. I'm afraid we are in for the time of our lives.

Female spies typically represented one of two extremes: the seductress who employed her wiles to manipulate men, and the cross-dresser who blended in by impersonating them.

The real Rose Hovick was seriously mentally disturbed; June Havoc called her a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.

I think Gypsy [Rose Lee] would be appalled at today's rawer, more blatant displays of the female form. She was, in her own way, a prude.

Gypsy [Rose Lee] wasn't a linear person, and she didn't live life in a linear fashion. She was relentlessly self-inventing, and moved backward as often as she moved forward.

In Gypsy [Rose Lee] the musical, her mother, 'Mama Rose', is portrayed as a slightly eccentric, pushy, ambitious stage mother, but that version doesn't come close to the truth.

I greatly admired Gypsy [Rose Lee] for being able to rise above her circumstances; I was terrified of her; I thought she was generous; I thought she was brilliant; I thought she was cruel.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

My heartfelt gratitude to my great teachers!

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

Oh dear! A drunken infidel weaver! said Mr. Hale to himself.

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

For some reason, and for a time such as this, God has given me favor with kings and princes.

I like it that my career has all the predictability and continuity of a children's nonsense rhyme.

And I have stopped eating tuna until the tuna nets cease killing tens of thousands of dolphins every single year.

Things are never as bad or as good as they seem.