By the time I was four, I would walk around the corner and wait at a local streetcar stop, get on the streetcar with somebody who looked like they could be my mother and go to the end of the line.

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.

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

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.

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

None of the people are what you think when you first meet them, who you think they are, and they turn out to be maybe something a little different.

75% of what happens to Paul Gascoigne in his life is fiction.

The subject for a lot of non-fiction is very emotional, but if you read it, it's the most boring, dry stuff. I wanted 'Torn Apart' to be extremely accessible and readable.

If Barack Obama cannot appreciate that our troops are winning in Iraq, he should not be their Commander in Chief.

You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.

Social awkwardness is not a sin, in defense of liberty.

The biggest problem for me was feeling that as I became more balanced and a better man that I wouldn't have the fire to create from.

On my last day of shooting, I'd be happy to say 'Cut, it's a wrap' and fall off the twig.

I'm very open to any visual conceits and any possibilities at my disposal to be better explain to people the ideas I'm exploring.