Cybill Shepherd

I think the measure of your success to a certain extent will be the amount of things written about you that aren't true.

I love to sing, and I warm up to Maria Callas.

Gore Vidal has been a friend of mine for years, and he's one of the greatest writers in American history.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

Some people say I'm attractive. I say I agree.

With the birth of my first child and my involvement with my first husband, I basically stopped lying. I just didn't want to lie anymore, because it reduces the stature of the person you're lying to.

I was born and bred to be a great flirt.

You know, women have a history of just being - we've been told all our lives not to say - in the fifties you couldn't say birth or even be pregnant hardly on television - and then gradually things have changed.

When I'm saying hysteria, I'm referring to Freud, because all the women were coming to him with symptoms and seeking help, and he just called it hysteria.

It's hard for women to talk about these things, and for the doctors to really talk about it too, and to even have the knowledge of what's going on. That's why I'm doing this and urging women to speak out and talk to their doctors frankly.

I did many interviews, and went out and talked to many people and went to rallies. It was the same thing with menopause. I traveled around the country on talk shows and talking to women about.

I had the serendipity of modeling during a temporary interlude between Twiggy and Kate Moss, when it was actually okay for women to look as if we ate and enjoyed life.

It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong - but that is the way to bet.

No man bosses me around, and no man ever will.

I had to lie so much about sex, first when I was 15, because I wasn't supposed to be having it. And then when I got older, I lied to everybody I was having sex with, so I could have sex with other people.

No, I always hated modeling. I developed an early hatred of modeling just from having to do it; having won Miss Teenage Memphis, I had to model, and I hated it. It bored me.

I know you are going to be embarrassed. We're all embarrassed by it, but to hide the embarrassment... silence has never protected women or helped them. We need to talk about it more with our, you know - whoever - our friends, our family.

They showed this one beautiful picture of me recently and they had all the things that I had done. I thought it was a great compliment for everybody to think I've had plastic surgery.

It's okay to talk about birth, okay - then menstruation. I first started my advocacy for women's health in the field of reproductive freedom, and the next stage would be bringing menopause out of the closet.

'Taxi Driver' was one of the happiest moments of my career.

My home is different from my mother's, because hers is filled with beautiful objects that I was always afraid of breaking. My home is the opposite. Bring on the kids, the dogs, the parties - there's nothing that's so important it can't be broken.