"I have been tied up with music for about as long as I can remember. By the time I was four I was picking out little tunes my mother played on the reed organ in the living-room"

"Music is my religion"

"Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible"

"What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin"

"Hope... is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles"

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away"

"I've always been into melodies. That's what I love about music – a good melody that gives you goosebumps"

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his"

"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization"

"Children that are raised in a home with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who come from divorced or step-parent, single-parent, cohabiting homes"

"We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it"