The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.

I took drugs because we all took drugs.

The way I choose to show my feelings is through my songs.

Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!

Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.

I think drugs were used by me as a way of suppressing my natural spirit.

I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.

The really explicit phrase is doors of perception.

The voice of God, if you must know, is Aretha Franklin's.

I think I'm really powerful. They'll smash me, probably.

All I can say is I've been lucky with my body. Well done, little body. I praise it and say, 'You're very good.'

Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.

France has been very good for me. It has given me a very worldly-cool attitude.

I am not frightened of much, but I wouldn't like to get ill.

I come from a very left wing Socialist family, anti-war and anti-empire.

I do have a strong sense of God. It's impossible to explain what I mean when I say that, of course.

I do take care of myself; I get my nails done, and I have a skin doctor, but that's it. I'm clean and groomed.

I do yoga. I do tai chi. I do a lot to keep my body and my spirit together so I can work.

I focus on the individual and not seeing this great big monster, 'the press.'

I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

I have always been attracted to the bleaker aspects of life. I love drama.

I have to watch out for being lazy.

I haven't got purity, and I don't think I ever did. I have always been, even as a child, a very decadent little person.

I know for a fact that Heaven and Hell are here on Earth.

I live a very nice life. I have a wonderful time. But it's not lived drawing on a full level. I'm relaxed, cool, and enjoying it.

I never like photos of myself in the beginning. I live with them for three months, put them in a drawer, take them out and look again. I hate the way I look, but of course it's really not that bad.

I serve black tea, which I call Froggy tea. And I have green teas and all sorts of nice teas. I'm serving tea all the time.

I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.

I thought I wanted to go to drama school or university, and that would have been a completely different life. But what got me was the sound, and hearing it. Hearing everything so loud, I loved that back in the studio. I loved that from the very beginning.

I want to see my grandchildren grow up. I want to be there for my friends. I want to be able to love the person in my life. I want to work. I want to do something I've never done, which is save money. I've never bought anything. I have nothing.

I was anorexic in the '60s and '70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now.

I was told that I had very likely been clinically depressed for a long, long time, probably since I was 15, or even 14. It explained, to me at least, a lot of my behaviour over the years.

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.

I wish people didn't just think of me in the '60s. I'm not any era.

I'd love to play a musician in a film.

I'm a Capricorn, and they flower late.

I'm alive today, I'm well, I'm working, I'm still creative. What more can I say, really?

I'm glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.

I'm having a great life, and I want to go on having one.

I'm not sure yet what my higher mission is, but I have a feeling it might be great. Before, I thought my mission was death, but now my mission is life.

I've done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go.

I've learnt to accept what has happened to my voice, I suppose, but I do wish it didn't sound quite so rough.

I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

Life has changed. People have changed. They are more forgiving, less inclined to rush to judgment. And I have changed.

My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they'd pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting.

My story is really an affirmation of my strength and my luck. To live with a great artist like Ted Hughes or Mick Jagger is a very, very destructive role for a woman trying to be herself. In fact, it can't be done.

Penitentiary songs have been a love of mine for years. They are so wonderful.

The equipment you've got really dictates what you're going to do. When I started touring, there were no monitors, so I had to take the sound from the hall, and of course it was on a delay, so I would sing, and then I would hear it back, but later. It was very weird.

The first opera I went to see was Maria Callas singing 'Tosca'.