With acting, the stark reality for women is that it's nearly impossible to get older in an elegant fashion as an actress. Either you're fighting your age, or you're having to own it in a way that feels inelegant, or you're Meryl Streep and you're an angel from God.

You can never stop discovering music.

I know that in life there will be sickness, devastation, disappointments, heartache - it's a given. What's not a given is the way you choose to get through it all. If you look hard enough, you can always find the bright side.

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.

I remember being a kid and seeing the 'National Inquirer' at the grocery store checkout line. When somebody actually picked up a copy, it was mortifying. You felt dirty for them. But now it's perfectly acceptable to read something like that. There's absolutely no taboo surrounding that kind of exploitation.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

Spy plots are hard, really hard.