Quotes by "Madonna Ciccone"

With all the chaos, pain and suffering in the world, the fact that my adoption of a child from who was living in an orphanage, you know, was the number one story for a week in the world. To me, that says more about our inability to focus on the real problems.

You realise that having a number one record and being loved and adored isn't the most important thing in the world. But at the same time, I don't have a problem with it. What I'm trying to say is, I'm not a reluctant pop star.

Sometimes you want to go for a walk and you don't want to be watched. You just want to be anonymous and blend in. Especially when I travel, I feel that way, because I can't really go out and see a city the way other people can and I miss out on a lot.

I live - I live a highly scheduled life. There's absolutely no time wasted. I'm very focused. And I have a great assistant.

Because I was a dancer, I started going to auditions for musical theater, which forced me to sing.

I am the result of the good choices I've made and the bad choices.

Of course, my interests and my focus change and become more diverse, more worldly. At the same time, I am interested in the simple basics, which is I love to dance and I love to make people dance.

Being famous has changed a lot, because now there's so many outlets, between magazines, TV shows, and the Internet, for people to stalk and follow you. We created the monster.

I have a funny relationship with religion. I'm a big believer in ritualistic behavior as long as it doesn't hurt anybody. But I'm not a big fan of rules. And yet, we cannot live in a world without order.

We like to put people on a pedestal, give them one character trait, and if they step outside of that shrinelike area that we blocked out for them, then we will punish them.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

I know I'm not the greatest singer or dancer, but that doesn't interest me. I'm interested in being provocative and pushing people's buttons.

Part of the reason I sort of shot out like a cannon out of Michigan and left home at such an early age is because I had to feel independent.

Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It's a painful religion. We're all gluttons for punishment.

I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's cheesy' or 'What do you think of this?'

I was more of a dancing kid than a singing kid. I mean, I sang in school choirs and I sang in school musicals, but I was much more interested in dancing than singing.

I tend to write during the day so I can see my children at night. But if my kids aren't with me and I have a chunk of time when I'm a single woman living in my house for a miraculous week, I will get to write at different hours.

I really saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella. I think that's when I really thought about how I wanted to do something else and get away from all that.

In England especially, I've found that if you bring up King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at a dinner party or a social gathering, it's like throwing a Molotov cocktail into the room.

When I first moved to New York, I wanted to be a dancer. I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence. I never tapped into nightlife; all I knew was dancers. We went to bed early and got up early and went to free concerts at the Lincoln Center and Shakespeare in the Park.