“All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.”

On one hand, I think it’s very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it’s not talked about, then we won’t progress.

You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born,

I can’t read in a car, because I’ll get sick. It’s almost instant.

Oftentimes, the most important decisions I make are the ones I don’t put much thought into.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.

I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.

I think what’s hard for me is not that I don’t get downtime to chill, it’s that I don’t get time to make music.

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you’re okay with who you are or where you came from.

When someone is a musician – trying to make a living off being a public figure – it’s really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn’t have a personal life.

Often I’ve had problems automatically bending to a lover’s will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, ‘This is what I love!’

I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.

I don’t care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

I think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.

Its all about taste.If you are cheap, nothing helps

Even when all is known, the care of a man is not yet complete, because eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise. For food and exercise, while possessing opposite qualities, yet work together to produce health.

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.

All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.

Lack of knowledge… that is the problem.

Comedy is all about the pause.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.