I got to realizing that I wanted to record, I wanted to experiment. And doing those same old songs the same old way - I said, 'I think it's time for me to have some fun.'
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.
I take my hat off to people like the Stones, but it's not for me. I couldn't do that. Jagger is brilliant and long may he rock. I couldn't make my career out of old songs; it would do my head in.
Kids know me from their Grease DVD, so they instantly respond. You can hear a pin drop when I do my old songs.
I was reading The Bible a lot through my 20s, mostly the Old Testament, just because I was knocked out by the language and the stories. I felt that the God being talked about there, who was this insane, vindictive patriarch - it was kind of thrilling, and titillated something in me at the time.
Give me the new thing and give it to me now. I don't want that old thing - I've seen it, heard it, bought it, slept with it, loved it, but now I'm bored with the old thing and I'm gagging for the new stuff.
Hair excited me. As the old ways - backcombing, rollers and rigidity - went out of the window, I started to feel the possibilities in front of my eyes.
I'm like old wine. They don't bring me out very often - but I'm well preserved.
Why in the world would anyone want to photograph an old woman like me?
There was once this viral photo of the Pope doing his Pope-mobile parade, and everyone had their phones up. But there was this one old woman looking over the fence so beautifully at him. She was totally in the moment. For me, then, I think there shouldn't be any phones at a Pope-mobile situation - or at a Beyonce concert.
If I see a now-28-year-old woman coming up to me, she's probably thinking of 'Juno' because she watched it with her parents when she was 18 years old.
I'm no longer the young woman I was playing before, and I'm in a profession where that continuum that is me is irrelevant to most people - they're meeting me for the first time, seeing me for the first time, and they're seeing an old woman, so that's what I've got to start being.
If someone's intimidated by me, that's something they have to deal with. When I walk down the streets of New York and an old woman grabs her purse when I pass by, I'm not going to give it a whole lot of energy because I'm not in the wrong. I'm a millionaire, and I'm not thinking about grabbing an old woman's purse.
Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately, word gets round, and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans.
An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.
There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.
I love old-time music, I love country music and I love the American music that we have to offer the world. And any part of that is fine with me, as long as it's pure.
As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time.
My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.
I had older brothers, and I don't think there's anything worse than an older brother. They pretty much told me the end of everything they got to see before I did.
