Once you lose the weight, you're really anxious to eat healthy.

My mother always told me, even if a song has been done a thousand times, you can still bring something of your own to it. I'd like to think I did that.

Long as I was riding in a big Cadillac and dressed nice and had plenty of food, that's all I cared about.

The two things you can't fake are good food and good music

All the things I used to like - cookies, ice cream, gumbo - I don't like anymore.

What happens is, when I perform, I'm somewhere else. I go back in time and get in touch with who I really am. I forget my troubles, my worries.

At last my love has come along. My lonely days are over and life is like a song.

I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies.

When I sing for myself, I probably sing for anyone who has any kind of hurt, any kind of bad feelings, good feelings, ups and downs, highs and lows, that kind of thing.

I want a Sunday kind of love A love to last past Saturday night And I’d like to know it’s more than love at first sight

I am the living dead girl because I am too weak to die. I hate those crying dough women on TV because they are just like me, weak and broken and clinging to the hands that hold us under.

You are my heaven. I just never knew I’d find it here on Earth.

I have actor friends, but they're not famous. I feel like if you're an actor or - famous, you have to overly prove that you're a normal, cool person.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.

The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

Alan Rickman, who was mentored me a lot. He was very keen to offer his opinions on stuff. Not in a pretentious way. Not in a patronizing way.

It is good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible.