The fact of the matter is that you can use your beauty and use your charm and be flirtatious, and you can get people interested in your beauty. But you cannot maintain that. In the end, talent is the only thing. My work is the only thing that's going to change any minds.

I pay attention to what's going on around me. I'm always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it's easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it's been about challenging myself - to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.

I wanted to be famous, I wanted everybody to love me. I wanted to be a star. I worked really hard, and my dream came true.

Being blonde is definitely a different state of mind. I can't really put my finger on it, but the artifice of being blonde has some incredible sort of sexual connotation. Men really respond to it. I love blonde hair but it really does something different to you. I feel more grounded when I have dark hair, and I feel more ethereal when I have light hair. It's unexplainable. I also feel more Italian when my hair is dark.

If I was a girl again, I would like to be like my fans, I would like to be like Madonna.

I try to have thick skin, but every once in a while I read something that someone says about me, and it's so slanderous and moralistic and it has nothing to do with my music.

I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.