Quotes from Linda Ronstadt

What my true addiction is is reading. I love to read. If I'd get too loaded, I couldn't remember the sentence I just read.

Love will abide, take things in stride.

I grew up in a big sky country. Then I lived in Manhattan, where you can only see the sky between buildings, and then I went into a building where you couldn't see the sky at all. I didn't like that so much.

The smell of the carpet in a hotel room is the same everywhere.

The music that I chose during my life, it wasn't arbitrary. It was all in my family home when I was growing up. I never tried to record anything I hadn't heard before the age of 10. Otherwise, I couldn't do it authentically.

I love everything soft, cashmere and down. I don't like anything scratchy.

It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know.

I've never been happy with the quality of my work. I always felt as though my musicianship was lacking and that I should have worked harder at it when I was younger. As I sang and sang, I improved.

Sometimes I was frivolous. Did you have some frivolous years? I had to live mine out in public.

You have to erect a fence and say, "Okay, scale this."

The whole thing with recording is you have to know when to turn off the tape machine and just stop recording because you want to keep fixing, fixing, fixing, you know?

In the Troubadour days, it was all those songwriters that I hung around with all the time, so I could get songs and find out what was going on. So we all knew each other, and we just carried each other's word around.

Everywhere you go, there's a soundtrack. You can't really quite hear it. It's just a little out of the range of hearing.

I got a couple of different contacts from publishing companies saying they'd be interested in a book about my work: not a kiss-and-tell book, which I specifically put in the contract. Just a book about my work and what I did.

I'm your basic atheist that believes in maybe - I'm a spiritual atheist.

I wish I had as much in bed as I get in the newspapers.

Ninety-nine percent of singing is listening and hearing, and so then 1 percent of it is singing.

You have the United States, and you have Mexico, and then you have this Mexican-American thing which is this third culture, which I like to call Aztlan.

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.

I wanted to sing when I was little. That's what I liked doing. It didn't occur to me that you became famous or anything like that.

I had a lot of chances to do things that other people don't ever get, and I have to be content with that. I have to look around for some other way to make myself useful.

Music is a work in progress. On a record, it gets frozen in time. And it's oddly unnatural.

As I got older, I got Parkinson's disease, so I couldn't sing at all. That's what happened to me. I was singing at my best strength when I developed Parkinson's. I think I've had it for quite a while.

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.