My mother and I are more than best friends; we are partners in crime. After she and my father, Quincy Jones, separated when I was 10 years old, my sister, Kidada, who was 12, went to live with our dad, and I stayed with my mother.

Music is hugely important to me.

Comedy is like music, and the way to make the best music is to have skilled musicians in your band.

With any television series - and it's something that is taken for granted with movies because you have the whole arc within two hours - you establish who the character is and it's a two-dimensional version, or if you're lucky, a two and a half-dimensional character. Once you establish that, you can move forward and break all the rules. Once the audience has accepted who the person is, then you can do the exact opposite. What makes it funny and interesting is doing the opposite.

I think there's just an inherent burden of being alive and being a woman. No man would ever admit that, but I think women know it, which is: You know more than men, you know more than most people you're dealing with every day, and you know that's it up to you to make things move forward, and you get paid half as much, but you just do it.

If you feel like you can't actually do the right thing and you're headed off into the field of justice, maybe there's no point in going into it.

For the most part, there's so much of me in my characters.