“I had all these singles come out within a two-month period, and then nothing for almost two years. You start to feel a little irrelevant. You realize how many people there are trying to be songwriters and how competitive it is and how political things can be.”

I’m a very stimulated person.

I’ve written poetry most of my life.

Once I heard how deep music could touch people and what it can make you feel and all of these emotions it could bring out, I was really fascinated with it all.

I just want to write fun, interesting music that pushes boundaries and is still true to myself. I want people to feel something.

My boyfriend and I like to fight a lot. I have a lot of problems. He has a lot of problems. Somehow, we always work them out and find a way back to each other.

I definitely always thought of myself as a songwriter before a singer.

My sister was the singer, and I always had the mentality there could only be one in the family.

I just remember really loving words and writing about anything I could, and the way I’d remember things, like my library card number, was to make a melody.

If I get writer’s block – this is going to sound funny – I take a shower. Something about the water feels like I’m cleaning my brain as well as my body.

I just wanted to write the songs. I never wanted to sing them.

I think artists are aware that talking gives a songwriter so much material. If they just tell us what’s happening, it’s so much easier for us to write a song that’s specific to them.

I would give anything to hold your hands like this again.

We could be history in the making.

Still finding silly string in weird places.

I write songs for myself, but I never keep them. I’m like, ‘O.K., that was my therapy – it’s out of my body now. I’m going to give it to somebody else so it can be their therapy, too.’

Women often don’t want to be typecast as the girl that’s sad.

I don’t feel I have to top myself at all.

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

When I was a teenager, my dad used to put a lot of pressure on me to be successful, and I’d really beat myself up about things like losing martial arts competitions.

A conversation isn’t a competition.

When deciding between two competing theories, always go with the one that doesn’t involve a magic spell.

There are two powers in the world; one is the sword and the other is the pen. There is a great competition and rivalry between the two. There is a third power stronger than both, that of the women.

As an actor, I don’t feel like it’s necessary to watch a great deal of films. In fact, I think it can lead to imitation and unhealthy competition, which just isn’t needed.

I was never going to give Mariah Carey any competition.