I don't understand that about Taylor Swift, or about Joan [Mitchell] - how can she not say she's a feminist?! People don't understand what the word means. It simply means equal rights before the law.

I don't care how somebody gets their education, as long as they have one.

I do use reality because I want my work to feel real, I want it to feel heartfelt. I don't want to make it up and have it sound corny or unrelatable.

Ten minutes before you go onstage and you begin singing that torchy blues song, you may just be drinking a glass of water and brushing your teeth and doing some deep breathing.

Singers, musicians, and songwriters don't want to use the word "acting" because we want it to be more real than that - we want it to come from us: naturally, truly, really.

I was brought up in the Christian church and I studied in the teachings of Jesus. I believed in caring for others and trying to be kind. It's something I still have to work on every day.

Things are changing. They need to change more. It should not be of any note that a woman does something, because women do everything.

Artists are able to do well in the political arena because of fame, if only they can educate themselves.

If you just take one foot in front of the other without any protection, you may end up falling off the fence.

The line is very delicate and fine between being what one might call sane or insane, well or unwell.

Feminism has nothing to do with partisanship.

Be the sun in someone’s dark sky.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy.

The checks and balances is a way to prevent government from either devolving into an autocratic tyranny or an autocratic mob mentality.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

And yet 50 percent of the kids who start high school in the United States today do not finish high school.

So the first thing you need to do about conflict is to prevent it, and the best way of preventing it is by dealing with the question of poverty.

The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.