“I decided early on that I was going to put on my crown and rule my world by acting right and treating myself like a queen.”

Most people don’t have so much talent that they can become a success all their own. We all need people to help us and lift us up.

To me, I always felt like I was carrying a torch for women of any size to be themselves – it doesn’t matter whether you’re a size 2 or a 22, just be who you are.

Every woman is a queen, and we all have different things to offer.

Dreams become reality when we put our minds to it.

It’s not always easy to do the right thing. But, doing the right thing makes you strong, it builds character.

Be bold, be brave enough to be your true self.

I write pretty often. I have a home studio. Music is what I do for fun. I never get tired of it, so to take a break from [TV and movies], I would go make some music.

If my brother and I wanted money in our pockets, we had to get jobs – my first was at 15, at Burger King.

There are different flavours of sexiness.

There are so many things I’d like to do. Like becoming a parent. To me that is the next natural progression in life.

You need to give yourself the time to think freely. I don’t know if that is political. But sometimes things are political because you observe things that are right or that are wrong and you want to speak on them.

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.

You can huff and puff. But blow me down? I doubt it kid, or you get your ass whupped.

When I was around 18, I looked in the mirror and said, ‘You’re either going to love yourself or hate yourself.’ And I decided to love myself. That changed a lot of things.

I think as far as the music industry is concerned, it’s kind of been the wild, wild West in a way with the Internet, which is not necessarily a bad thing to me.

I do feel like I have a direct connection with God for some reason; always have since I was a little kid – I would talk to God, talk to the sky.

I think I was just bored one summer afternoon, and I decided to post a little video of me singing and playing guitar out of tune.

When my husband Edgar and I were courting, he said he couldn’t wait to have a baby. It was only after we were married that he changed his mind and decided that I should have the baby.

For me, I’m in the driver’s seat; I’m No. 1 in the world. I’ve won the last couple of meetings, and I’ve won the big tournaments lately. Whoever comes, I’ll try to beat him. But it’s almost up to me to decide who’s my rival, isn’t it?

I decided I can’t pay a person to rewind time, so I may as well get over it.

It was a very long and hard decision. My dad kept telling me, ‘You can always go to college, but you can’t always go pro.’ That made sense to me.

A wise person decides slowly but abides by these decisions.

When God decides its time, I guess he’ll come for us.

There’s a rhythm to the legislative session and there are rhythms to legislative sessions. So I think that’s very important to take into consideration when you are deciding what to do when.