I've been doing African dance all my life.

It's believing you can push through the exhaustion just to be able to sing after you do a cartwheel or a split.

I prefer to sing in the shower because the acoustics make you sound great, baby.

I cried when I found out I was a finalist, I kind of went limp when they called my name. I felt like my spirit jumped out of my body, and I was just flesh - it was just amazing.

The live setting is always better for me. I usually thrive at live. I feel like having a band behind me and being able to interact with the crowd helps boost my energy up.

Always stay true to yourselves.

If my life was a song the title would be 'Naima'.

I wouldn't mind doing Broadway, but I am definitely trying to get a album out there first.

I couldn't imagine having to write a paper and have to think about what song I am going to sing.

Silence can answer the question words may fail to answer. If you want to know what silence can do, keep silence!

Much rain wears the marble.

Leave the atom alone.

Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities.

To me the book is like having a kid. I have to let it go out in the world, and great things will happen. Maybe they won't, but it has to keep on moving.

Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance. We can create.

You learn to write by doing it.

It's the same at a rock-and-roll concert. You have an opening number with a strong entrance; then you go through a lot of the old standards, building up to your hit song at the end.

Out of the experience of extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.

As long as the wrong people hold power, how can the right political climate even arise?