Some people are suspicious of others who have more than one talent. I've had poets tell me to my face that an actress can't be a poet.
I find that I get a little depressed if I don't move my body each day, so sometimes it's just as simple as walking, and other times it's training for a marathon or some kind of personal goal that I'm trying to meet.
All human beings are inherently good, so when someone goes off the rails, there must be some mitigating factor - he was bullied, was a loner, had an abusive father, or a domineering mother, etc.
Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.
There are so many great YouTubers who might have a hit, but they come and they go. Maintaining and being here, just being able to relate to what's going on and putting my spin on the world, I bring not my age, but my my wisdom, and that's something some of the younger ones can't contribute.
I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.
I am much more open to plural marriage than I was before, and I now support it in certain situations. I do believe it is right for some people. But our example in America today is gross abuse - I can't support it in fundamentalist compounds.
I grew up in a house that was always happy, and my family was always music, music. I started playing percussion very young, because I had some uncles who were musicians and all my aunts were singers.
I have achieved what I wanted to achieve. I'm better off at some sort of independent place where they not only like what I produce but also trust me to be the one to produce it.
If you're a poker player and you show up at a casino at 8 a.m., you're going to be by yourself or with some people that are rocks and just don't give you any action.
It's a strange one - I've been away for 20 years now; I've been away longer than I lived in Canada, but for some reason I remain wholly Canadian.
You can watch a little bit of war from your nice living room - 30 seconds of what's going on in Syria - and when you've had enough, switch over to some celebrity programme. We live our life through screens and images in this way, and we don't know what is real or fake anymore. It doesn't matter.
I always wanted to do something different with each film. So I guess that means that I wanted to not repeat myself. There has to be some kind of a new element in each project that I take up.
Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art.
The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. This new set of tools, often referred by the lofty term 'Big Data,' has begun to emerge as a new approach to addressing some of the biggest challenges facing our planet.
A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.
I'm in R&B/Soul, and I feel like all my music is R&B driven. Even some of the songs that are more rap have an R&B feel, so I'm with that.
In a sense, by closing off the idea that young Muslims, and particularly young Muslim men, can be American heroes, it increases the chance that they'll try to be some other kind of hero. And that, I think, is entirely counterproductive.
I've always loved doing covers. Some artists don't like covers. Some listeners don't like covers. But I love them. It gives you a new perspective production-wise. It's easier for me, if I'm starting a new record, I like to produce a few songs that aren't mine just so it frees me up not to worry about it so much.
I was a freshman at Stanford University the first time someone called me a 'bama.' One of my new friends from D.C. said it, laughing, and even though I didn't know what it meant, exactly, I got that it was some kind of insult. I must have smirked or shrugged, which made him laugh harder, and then he called me 'country,' too.
As children, we develop some scorn for our parents and their imperfections.
Designers want their clothes and their shows to be absolutely perfect, exactly as they imagined, and there is a great deal of work that goes into doing that. Some collections can tell a whole story, from the first look to the last. The way the colors and the clothes transition is very interesting.
Much before I entered films, my dad walked into my room and saw me busy drawing something at 3 A.M. He stood there for some time and said, 'Whatever career choice you make, you are going to be successful.' I'll never forget those words. It gave me the confidence to be who I am today.
I resisted being an actor for some time.
Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested - they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothy Dix.
Come on, we would be foolish to say that there's never been African-American leads in some capacity, people of color in some capacity, leading shows or what have you. But it hasn't happened enough and in a manner that is an accurate reflection of the world that we live in.
I really love all types of music. I'm really open to that. I really love Bruno Mars, Justin Timberlake and some James Taylor and Elton John stuff.
I'd love to do more comedy. It'd just be nice to go into work and not be crying every day. Some broad slapstick would be great. Falling over banana skins would be wonderful.
I've got no dark secrets, I wasn't beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that's where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.
If you are going to be serving a living thing, you have to honor that living thing with some kind of care and thought and preparation to rationalize the taking of that life in some way. Where if you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things.
In both our personal and professional lives, there are times when reality dictates that we must stand up and 'end' something. Either its time has passed, its season is over, or worse, continuing it would be destructive in some way.
Fans are very emotional people, and when they have seen you with some people and they like your chemistry, they expect you to work with the same person again.
It's like there's some unwritten rule that if you're mates, you can say what you want to each other, and you don't really get that annoyed about it.
I think it's really hard to move between genres, and I think, especially in Britain, we're very judgmental about it - me included. I know that when an actor comes out with some poetry or an album, I think, 'Oh crikey, what's this going to be like?'
Things are old. Parts are old. I'm talking about 'us' parts. AARP-parts. Some of us were born with stronger parts than others.
For some artists the live performance is the chicken before the egg of writing or recording of repertoire. For other artists the writing or recording of repertoire is the chicken before the egg of live performance.
