Growing up with the childhood that I had, I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless, and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women.

I'm an ocean, because I'm really deep. If you search deep enough you can find rare exotic treasures.

So, where's the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?

The female body is something that's so beautiful. I wish women would be proud of their bodies and not diss other women for being proud of theirs.

You can never be too perfect, too thin, too curvy. I'm very confident and happy with my body.

I am Ecuadorian but people felt so safe passing me off as a skinny, blue-eyed white girl.

I don't think there is such a thing as being too raunchy when it comes to the art form of burlesque.

There was no way in hell I was going to jeopardize my baby for my show.

Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.

I love theatrics and have a huge imagination: Why would I want to sit onstage and sing a bunch of ballads back-to-back?

I remember watching the Grammys and looking at the performances and crying to my mom, saying how much I wanted to be there.

Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.

The last 16 years of my daddys life, he got to work for me, and that made him his own boss and he like that.

There is only one sky and we must take care of it, for if it becomes sick, everything will come to an end.

God will lead you into a deliverance where the means that delivers you will be those who would destroy you.

I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.

Well my chocolate is so good I could sell it in an obnoxious prism shape.

You can't say you want things to be simple and then in the next breath ask me to be honest.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

Some say that life has no form, that it is extremely diffuse. I think I can agree with them. ... A life without conclusions is painful.

Enthusiasm Rules his inner world. Determination Rules his outer world. Therefore Happiness has become His real name.