Use your faults, use your defects; then you're going to be a star.
When you reach the top, you should remember to send the elevator back down for the others.
Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth.
I want to make people cry even when they don't understand my words.
I was hungry. I was cold. But I was also free. Free not to get up in the morning, not to go to bed at night, free to get drunk if I liked, to dream... to hope.
All I've done all my life is disobey.
Every damn fool thing you do in this life you pay for.
My conservatory is in the streets. My intelligence is instinct.
Don't care what people say. Don't give a damn about their laws.
When he takes me in his arms, and speaks to me softly, I see the world through rose-colored glasses.
As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face.
I always thought my days spent in darkness [as a child she had cataracts and was unable to see for nearly four years] gave me a very special sensitivity. Much later, when I really wanted to hear, really 'see' a song, I'd close my eyes, and when I wanted to bring it out of the very depths of myself, out of my guts, out of my belly, when the song had to come from far away, I'd close my eyes.
I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears.
I can die now. I've lived twice.
I don't lie; I improve on my life.
Performers and their public should never meet. Once the curtain comes down, the performer should fly away like a magician's dove.
To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.
People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.
If God has allowed me to earn so much money, it is because He knows I give it all away.
I'd like to see one person - just one - who would own up to having been a coward.
I want to die young. I think it's awful to get old, and sickness is ugly.
For me, sleeping is a waste of time. I'm afraid to sleep. It's a form of death.
Americans want beauties, not me. I’m not the Parisian bombshell they expected. Can you see me as a chorus girl? Where’s my feather up the ass? They think I’m sad, they’re dumb. I don’t connect to them
Drugs are a carnival in hell.
Death is the beginning of something.
