“I wanted to be part of changing the world. I don’t want to just stand by and watch it be however it is.”

Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely.

A lot of us don’t get a sense of our personal power. I know the vast difference that one person can make in changing things.

Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you’re not writing a song, it’s like that.

What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. “Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we’re going to go support the cannery workers’ strike in Watsonville.”

I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn’t want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, “Don’t be sexist!” because that’s not how I talk in regular life.

What I’m trying to do is make music that people relate to, that talks about ideas that are personal but also make that connection to trying to make revolutionary change, and I don’t need to change my music to get to a certain audience.

In high school, everybody rapped. You just pounded on the table.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

When one is striding bravely into the future one cannot watch one’s footing.

If I really have nothing to do, I just watch my cats, take some photos, and go back to my personal blog.

It is so inspiring when you come across a woman who is very strong and dedicated and is amazing at what they do. That’s how I feel about Meryl Streep.

I go back to many films that I really love.

I don’t watch my own films. There is little time; I’d rather see another film.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

It feels good to watch TV and know that you’re being represented on somebody’s network and for certain communities, it feels even better to know that you’re being depicted truthfully.