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.

Another turn in my life happened when I took on the Canada Council.

Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.

After Bruno Walter, my career went in leaps and bounds. I have had 35 years of a career that is just incredible, and a wonderful time all over the world.

I have been all over the world. I have met some wonderful people, lots of them very simple, whom nobody will ever hear about, but who have been fabulous to me.

By the time I was four, I would walk around the corner and wait at a local streetcar stop, get on the streetcar with somebody who looked like they could be my mother and go to the end of the line.

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

Making a living in the arts, though, creates so many jobs for other people.

I have three grandchildren and am hoping for 20.

I have had five phenomenal children, a great husband and, even though we are separated, we are good friends.

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

That is what I always tell service clubs: If you hear of somebody who is very young and talented, pick them up and give them that little assistance to make sure that they get to the professional stage.

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.

My mother was a wonderful, wonderful woman with a lovely voice who hated housework, hated cooking even more and loved her children. She was always arranging church activities such as a bazaar.

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

If somebody asks me to recommend a young, good singer, I always do.

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.

Young people can get very discouraged and get hooked on drugs or on alcohol because of problems they perceive as insurmountable. It is important that they realize a mistake need not ruin their future, but they must also know that not everything in life is a bed of roses.

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

The student body was huge at UT and you had to mature pretty quick, very quick actually. I enjoyed it and it helped me a lot in my life in general - not only in the classroom but on the baseball field as well.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

Whenever I wasn't watching the planes, I was playing community baseball, football, or something like that.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

Baseball is a team game.

I never ride just to ride. I ride to catch a fox. I play baseball to make the team.

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or on the ball.

I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?

After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.

The great thing about baseball is when you're done, you'll only tell your grandchildren the good things. If they ask me about 1989, I'll tell them I had amnesia.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

A baseball game is simply a nervous breakdown divided into nine innings.

Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand.

I don't know what you guys say, but at home, life is way different from baseball.

Let the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say isn't, and they ain't eating.

Words can be like baseball bats when used maliciously.

I don't know anything about baseball.

I was born to hit a baseball. I can hit a baseball.

Richard Schiff is a really good baseball player. It's surprising because he looks exhausted.

It's very warm there, so we were outdoors all the time. The local people had programs for us year-round, where as kids we had the opportunity to play football, basketball, baseball, track and field - we just went from one sport to the next, year-round.

I'm proud to be here as a man that has played first base more than anybody in the game of baseball.

I always thought that there was going to be life after baseball, and so I designed that in my life I would have other interests after baseball that I would be able to step into. And I didn't realize the grip that baseball had on me and on my family.

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

Well, my favorite sport as a kid was clearly baseball.