"My biggest nightmare is I'm driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: 'Please help me.' And the people say: 'Hey, you look like...' And I'm dying while they're wondering whether I'm Barbra Streisand."

"I love road trips! My husband and I love that. We bought a truck with a bench seat so we could put the dog in the middle."

"Nobody on this earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong."

"I knew that with a mouth like mine, I just hadda be a star or something."

"I don't care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong."

"I love things that are indescribable, like the taste of an avocado or the smell of a gardenia."

"There is nothing more important in life than love."

"There's a part of you that always remains a child, no matter how mature you get, how sophisticated or weary."

"I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me."

"To have ego means to believe in your own strength. And to also be open to other people's views. It is to be open, not closed. So, yes, my ego is big, but it's also very small in some areas. My ego is responsible for my doing what I do - bad or good."

"A man who graduated high in his class at Yale Law School and made partnership in a top law firm would be celebrated. A man who invested wisely would be admired, but a woman who accomplishes this is treated with suspicion."

"I can take any truth; just don't lie to me."

"We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities."

"What is exciting is not for one person to be stronger than the other... but for two people to have met their match and yet they are equally as stubborn, as obstinate, as passionate, as crazy as the other."

"I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven."

"I find George Bush and Dick Cheney frightening, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft frightening."

"It always gave me the creeps when I saw performers who desperately wanted the audience to like them. That's not what I'm about."

"The audience is the barometer of the truth."

"I'm a work in progress."

"I just became a singer, because I could never get work as an actress."

"I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good."

"Oh God, don't envy me, I have my own pains."

"I wish I could be like Shaw who once read a bad review of one of his plays, called the critic and said: 'I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.'"

"I like simple things. Elastic waists, so I can eat."