No, because I was always nervous about being onstage.

- Carly Simon

I'm still more comfortable with standards than with my own songs.

- Carly Simon

Well, I make every song I sing personal. I've never chosen a song that wasn't.

- Carly Simon

Being in this business for as long as I've been in it, it's sort of like living in a town or a city before the war and then after the war and then during the reconstruction and then during the time that it sprawls out to the malls.

- Carly Simon

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

- Carly Simon

But when we listened to the radio, it was Bill Haley and the Comets or the Everly Brothers.

- Carly Simon

I always sang standards because the songs I wrote for myself weren't as easy to sing.

- Carly Simon

I try to get to those peculiar and particular things that you never think of to say.

- Carly Simon

My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.

- Carly Simon

My look was even more solidified when I started singing in Greenwich Village with my sister Lucy. We wore matching dresses as the Simon Sisters.

- Carly Simon

I think that most people really know if it's a really great album.

- Carly Simon

No, because I've never really changed my style that much.

- Carly Simon

So I suppose this slightly mature fashion sense happened because of what I had.

- Carly Simon

Sometimes, but the year I lived in France I started to write songs.

- Carly Simon

The models for me were more the folk-rock singers of the '60s and '70s.

- Carly Simon

Then I went through a big Peggy Lee stage, then I became Annie Ross, then Judy Collins.

- Carly Simon

There was a French singer, Francoise Hardy - I used to look at her pictures and try to dress like her.

- Carly Simon

We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.

- Carly Simon

Well, I tried to get a record deal in 1966 or '67, and everyone thought I was too eclectic.

- Carly Simon

Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.

- Carly Simon