Once I started singing, I realized it was a language I'd forgotten I could speak.

I think that's the role of an artist, right? To touch someone and make us stretch out just a little bit more.

In an abusive relationship - we'll talk about men and women - women are often restrained, by words or out of fear, from leaving. They will tolerate abuse up to and including being put to death.

I just kind of tried to stay true to myself.

I just love music. I love all kinds of music, and I was exposed to it, me and my siblings, from the time we were in utero.

To be up on stage and interacting with musicians, that was a huge epiphany for me.

Hey, maybe I can sing locally and earn a couple of bucks.

I've never been the type of singer that can sing in heels and the gown and all this stuff, because I can't get to where I want to go while I'm in that getup.

You have to be willing to look a certain way, and hold your body a certain way, until you get to where you want to go - I'm talking about musically, now.

There's a certain place you want to get to, and in order to do that, you have to be vulnerable.

I often compare singing to lovemaking because there's so many similarities.

You must refuse to entertain or shelter in your mind, any thought or belief that goes against your happiness and success in life.

The world rewards you for what is in your mind, the universe rewards you for what is in your heart, and the Heavens reward you for what is in your soul.

We wonder with our thoughts to where we wish to be.

You do not want to get married at 22! Especially if you're famous, because girls are going to be throwing themselves at you.

Everybody has goals, aspirations or whatever, and everybody has been at a point in their life where nobody believed in them.

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.

Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.

I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.

Knowledge is the best eraser in the world for disharmony, distrust, despair, and the endless physical deficiencies of man.