As a child I always wanted to be a singer. The music my mother played in the house moved me - Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Mahalia Jackson. It was truly spiritual. It made you understand what God was. We are all spirits. We get depressed. But music makes you want to live. I know my music has saved my life.

I don't want no drama in my life, even though we have a little bit, but no more letting people control you. That's drama, because then you become something that you're not.

As a kid, I was in love with Michael Jackson, and I just knew I was going to marry him someday.

In your life there's peaks and valleys and sometimes we regress, and we don't even know we regress. You just have to learn how to accept all of your mistakes and learn to love yourself again.

It's sad that a lot of identities are lost and a lot of careers are lost because there's sort of a clone thing going on.

By the time I was a teenager, when I went outside the house, it was about hip-hop all the time. Nothing but hip-hop, block parties.

When I`m going to do a Christmas album I had to put my mind in Christmas mode. I had to go back to being a child and remembering all of that. When I go to do a project, I'm serious about it, so I wrap my world around it, and it becomes Christmastime for me and I'm singing songs like it's Christmas day.