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.

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.

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.

If somebody asks me to recommend a young, good singer, I always do.

A whetstone, though it cannot cut, may sharpen a knife that will.

My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off.

No wonder I’d never had any friends. I was shockingly bad at it.

Stay true to what makes you happy, because that always ends up producing the best result.

Central to living a life that is good, is a life that's forgiving.

Anyone who has ever asked for directions knows you need two crucial pieces of information to get good results: a starting point and a destination.

Dolls are like small dead people.

Valor is abased by too much loftiness.

No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself.

As powerful as our legs are, as magnificent as our lungs and arms and muscles are, nothing matters more than the mind.