I am used to being on tours with people who are fantastic performers and I respect them and I love their music. But the bottom line is they got the vision for what we are trying to do.

When I was around 18, I looked in the mirror and said, 'You're either going to love yourself or hate yourself.' And I decided to love myself. That changed a lot of things.

What would your life be like if you found out you had 3 weeks left? And you know that you had not begun to live? And you had all these dreams and all these possibilities. And all these things you wanted to do and things you wanted to say and now time's up?

I often find it's just the confidence that makes you sexy, not what your body looks like. It's how you feel about yourself that makes you sexy.

Having Black hair is unique in that Black women change up styles a lot. You can walk down one street block in New York City and see 10 different hairstyles that Black women are wearing: straight curls, short cuts, braids - we really run the gamut.

If there are kids who want to follow in my footsteps, I'd say that my shoes are too big for them to fill! But their shoe size is just perfect.

I lost relatives to AIDS, a couple of my closest cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high-school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't really deny it, and you can't run from it.