I'm a big micro manager; I'm a stickler about organisation; everything needs a place, a purpose, and micro managing myself even when I'm in the studio.

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.

You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.

Jazz is democracy in music.

When I'm, like, 30, I want to go off the map, have a family and live in Malibu with a farm, and just raise my own chickens.

Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?

I think the world of politics is pretty sleazy.

Let us build a SAARC satellite which we can dedicate to our neighbourhood, as a gift from India.

Because of my personal history, my professional skills and my business achievements, I am a man nobody can expect to compare himself with.

It is more reverent to believe in the works of the Deity than to comprehend them.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.