“Love your mother, she bore you. Love your father, he works for you.”

And givin’ yourself to me can never be wrong.

An artist, if he is truly an artist, is only interested in one thing and that is to wake up the minds of men, to have mankind and womankind realize that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.

Marriage is miserable unless you find the right person that is your soulmate and that takes a lot of looking.

Music is one of the closest link-ups with God that we can probably experience. I think it’s a common vibrating tone of the musical notes that holds all life together.

I am not going to be dictated to by fans, certainly. I am dictated enough to by my record company to last me a million years.

To share is precious, pure and fair. Don’t play with something you should cherish for life. Don’t you wanna care, ain’t it lonely out there?

Great artists suffer for the people.

Every chance you get you seem to hurt me more and more, but each hurt makes my love stronger than before.

Anger destroys your soul.

If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.

Who are they to judge us, simply because our hair is long?

I don’t make records for pleasure. I did when I was a younger artist, but I don’t today. I record so that I can feed people what they need, what they feel. Hopefully, I record so that I can help someone overcome a bad time.

Negotiating means getting the best of your opponent.

Crime is increasing, trigger happy policing. Panic is spreading, God knows where we’re heading.

Sexual healing is good for me.

Art is a way of possessing destiny.

My mom wanted to make sure I was prepared to grow up with Black skin in America.

My mom, Nellie, got me a rosary at church. I don’t use it to pray before a competition. I’ll just pray normally to myself, but I have it there in case.

I am not, at the end of the day, a mother, a wife, a writer, an activist, a friend. I am a child of God. That’s who I was when I came into this world and who I’ll be when I leave it. No one can take that from me.

I realized I didn’t just want to parent children in my own little home but to mother the whole world. What’s the point of gaining influence if you’re not going to use it?

I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.

Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.

Being a mother is a little like ‘Groundhog’s Day.’ It’s getting out of bed and doing the exact same things again and again and yet again – and it’s watching it all get undone again and again and yet again. It’s humbling, monotonous, mind-numbing, and solitary.

What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.