When I started to sing, my mother would have me engaged to perform at the Women's Christian Temperance Union national or annual meetings. I would hate doing this because I wanted to play baseball or go off skiing.

I thought I should go to New York because it was the place to go to study. I went and tried to get an application from the Juilliard School but they wouldn't even give me one because I didn't have my high school graduation.

I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one.

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.

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.

It makes one a better person to have had hardships and to have overcome hardships and not to blame anybody else for your mistakes.

I was born in Montreal and came from a lower-middle-class family.