The only reason to be with somebody is that they make you a better person and you make them a better person.

Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than the birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.

I just thought that I was going to get to sing for a living and I wouldn't have to go to work in the department store or whatever else you did if you were a woman in those days.

Everybody has their own level of doing their music. ... Mine just happened to resonate over the years, in one way and another, with a significant enough number of people so that I could do it professionally.

I thought everybody could sing, because everybody in my family could.

I never went to the Beatles' concerts to scream. I never screamed at anybody's show. I was on my feet with the entire, all of the crowned heads of Motown, and we were shrieking our guts out.

Every single year since they invented sound recording it gets better and better. We've always improved it. With MP3, which just sounds awful, it's the first time in the history of recorded music that it sounds worse. It's really - and it's everywhere, it's ubiquitous.