There is a spirit in all music, the spirit has the ability to conjure up thoughts even pictures of something that happened or you wished would happen or you anticipate happening. Music has the ability to create ideas in you and me. It has the ability to encourage us to be creative.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

If I insist on being pessimistic, there is always tomorrow. Today I am blessed.

Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.

It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

There's something beautiful about the fact that Obama was not just elected, but elected decisively across racial, and socio-economic and cultural groups and that we all celebrated in his win.

I do not think of myself as unusually creative. I think we all come from the creator, each human being streaming with the glory. So each one of us is creative.