There's a weighing kind of overemphasis on sexuality, which disempowers music generally, because it silences all the other voices; it makes music a very powerless force for changing the world.

The trouble when you have a job like mine is it's your social life as well, so I need to actually [find] something to do in my downtime when my kids are at school.

I have always had a good functioning in my artistic life, but I had problems mostly in my private life, I got very angry with my boyfriends and stuff...I would probably have good reasons to be angry but the volume would be too high, just getting to some level of wounding that perhaps was not appropriate to the actual offence committed.

When you dishonor the the utter glory and majesty of black people, you lie. Your heart lies to you and you let it

When you're young, you don't really know quite what you're aiming at. You're very impulsive and acting on impulse, which is very important and valuable. But you're kind of swimming in a blind sea. When you get older, you have more of a sense of direction.

People often talk about me as a singer, but they don't often talk about you when you're a woman as a songwriter.

That's my feeling - that real God and religion are two different things and that religion is trying to obscure what God really is.