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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breath and their water is safe to drink.

Women are hard on themselves. I’m trying to stop focusing on my flaws and appreciate what I love about my body.

We are all quick to point out all the differences but not as willing to accept what bonds us as humans.

They've lost their minds.

Pale ink is better than the most retentive memory.

Everything has its cycle. I think it's appropriate for us to be ending now. But the beauty of storytelling, and the beauty of film and television is that it continues on.

... true love is like religion, it hath its silence and its sanctity.

There is sometimes only a very fine line between deliberation and procrastination.

I love Australia passionately. I love our landscape. It's influenced most of my work, really. Almost everything I've written is about the landscape. Trying to find, the sacred, the spiritual in it.