We are getting an education of a lifetime. We're actually out there in the real world.

You get educated by traveling.

Any decision I make is based on myself, and the only person I have to give an explanation to is God.

I think many people, especially from other cultures, just don't understand the role hair plays in Black women's lives.

As an artist, everybody has the opportunity to celebrate and speak their truth.

I have to learn how to say no a lot. Life is too short for anything else.

I actually love my natural hair when it's in a twist out and it's been slept on for five days and revived by the steam of the shower.

Style is the way we communicate who we are to people before we open our mouths.

The album ['A Seat at the Table'] really feels like storytelling for us all and our family and our lineage.

I don't really have guilty pleasures. Anything musically that I fully, fully believe, is good no matter who the artist is, no matter what the marketing is behind it, I stand pretty firm.

I've let go of being a super perfectionist on every single note and wanting the pitch to be absolutely perfect all of the time. I grew up watching the best of the best.

Who I am now is who I was before. The three years between, they were the aberration. You wouldn't recognize the person I became during that lost time. I barely do.

No matter how bad things are, you can at least be happy that you woke up this morning.

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I've - if it did occur - that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

If you want to know what love is, have a child. If you want to know what pain is, bury him.

People suffer from pain and call it evil, yet in reality it may be growing pains of the Spirit-the changing of the body into a finer and more spiritual substance.

I want to say less, and it's easier to say less.

The women are the movers and shakers in the community...they initiate things...they keep things going.

Don't imitate. If you want to know who you are, please avoid imitation, that's a way of avoiding knowing yourself.

I now know that anything sweet, really sweet, that I have was nothing that I planned. If you don't have kids and animals, you don't truly know what real life is about.

If the person you are trying to diagnose politically is some sort of intellectual, the chances are two to one he is a Democrat.