I realized I wasn’t sounding as good as my reputation was, so I wanted to kind of get to that point where I wouldn’t be ashamed to go on the bandstand, which happened to me one time on a job I was playing with… Elvin Jones, at that time, was the drummer playing with me. We used to go around, had a big sign, “Sonny Rollins is coming to town,” everybody was there, but I didn’t sound good, and I knew I wasn’t playing up to what I should be. So I said, “Okay, I am getting out of here. I am going to go and woodshed,” as they say, and get myself together.

As a very young singer, I was invited to the opera house in Berlin by the then-director of the opera house, Egon Seefehlner, and I had one opera to my name that I knew. He felt that there was a lot that I could learn there, which was very true, and I was so lucky to be able to have this opportunity. The thing that was happening is that I kept being offered operas that I knew that I wasn’t ready to sing, just from an experience point of view, as well as being 24 years old. So I was always asked to sing things that I thought, “Well no, I really don’t think I should sing that now. I need to sing that maybe in five years, or maybe in 10 years, but not right now. Couldn’t I please sing something else?” And that became a difficulty for me. And after being at the opera house for three years, and singing Elsa and Elisabeth — the Wagner roles that are not sort of the heavy Wagner roles — and then Mozart operas that suited my voice at the time, I was continually invited to sing things that I just felt I shouldn’t. So I took it upon myself to go to speak with the artistic director to say that I thought I should leave the opera house, and come back in some years when my maturity sort of chronologically would have caught up with the invitations that I was being offered. Of course, considering that he’d taken me into the opera house when I knew one role, he wasn’t all that happy. I thought he’d say, “Oh, what a smart girl. Oh yes, absolutely. That’s what we’ll do.” No, no. He was absolutely furious.

Well, I ran out of gas. You know, I got to be what, 93 at that time, or something like that. And it just – same reason I gave up teaching. I teach – I was – I taught every year from when I was 21 till 88 or 89, and there just came a period when your body said different things to you, and you should turn it over to somebody, just like I did at Berkshire.

By the time I admitted that I needed a hip operation, I had denied it for so long that it was a breakthrough to suddenly say, “I need this.” I knew I would probably never dance again, but I had no choice. By that time, I just wanted to be normal. I wanted to walk down the street without limping. I couldn’t tie my shoes. I couldn’t put slacks on. I was the farthest thing from a person who ever could dance and do all those extremely incredible extensions and contortions that we do.

I would like to write a play which doesn’t disappoint me 20 years later.

I’ve become fonder and fonder of Brian Friel and Faith Healer has sort of become my favourite play.

One day you write nothing, the next you write eight pages. It’s not in your hands.

Every morning, Monday to Friday, I get up at 7am and make my wife breakfast in bed.

I took Nicole out to dinner for the first time on 19 October, 1991. After that, everything changed.

if you have never suffered from self-loathing, lucky you.