I don't think of myself as just a pop artist, but someone who knows she has a bigger meaning. I'm not doing this for myself; I'm doing this because it's my destiny.

The marketing is just as important as the music, almost.

History is filled with fictional people.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.

Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn't objectify them.

If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.

Activists are cultural artists. They envision a world that does not yet exist, and then take action to create that world.'