You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny, and hope that whatever your art is that you're putting out there, if it's received, great, I respect you for receiving it. If it's not received, great, I respect you for not.

I gotta go home and feed my eels. They're not electric, but I have a plan.

The first time I saw E.T., the actual image of an alien, and he was so sweet-looking. I wanted him. I wanted E.T.

It is important to learn as much as you can about the person and then throw it all away so that you're not in any way doing some sort of mimicry.

The fact that women are very young in obtaining their civil rights and African-Americans are young in obtaining their civil rights, I think it's about time that we extend that to all Americans, whether straight, gay, purple, green, black, brown.

Even in my music, I am always searching for big, universal things - ways that you can sort of reach outside the norm of what you are doing.

Unfortunately, there's a lack of roles for women of color, so you actually have to be the engineer creating some of those roles.