Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, if your standard-bearer for the presidency is not doing well, it's gonna reflect on the down-ballot.
I always assume that a chick is not into me. So it's never natural for me to be like, 'Check out that girl in the corner. She's waiting for me to come up to her. I'm gonna to work my six-step process...'
I think Americans appreciate that my dad's a genuine guy. He's not gonna manicure every little word, and he's not massaging it. He's not running computer analytics to tell you what you want to hear and then do whatever the special interests tell him what they want him to do in the end.
I'm gonna tell y'all what we tell the crowd every night when we play back in the States. We tell them to remember people sleeping in a sandstorm so that we can be free.
'Never Gonna Give You Up' in 1987 was a huge international hit followed by several more, and while I appreciated how lucky I was, it catapulted me into a completely new world and simply took over my life.
Well, I've maybe gotten 200 requests for interviews about Marilyn, and I just decided I'm gonna do my own.
You know, I just do whatever feels right to me! And so that's what you're gonna get!
I'm a lesbian. Yup. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. I remember being in college, and I had fallen in love with this woman, and I remember sitting in my dorm room saying out loud to myself, like, 'You have enough problems. You are not gonna let this happen.' You just kinda, like, stuff it away until - well, some people stuff it away forever.
My perspective is never gonna change on that... We've got to do a much better job to take care of poor people, because you cannot put all the poor people in bad neighborhoods, send them to bad schools, and say, 'Good luck in life.' That's just not right.
I ain't gonna work on YouTube's farm no more.
I gotta admit, when you've been doing this a long time, going out to the audience and asking for them to help out with crowdfunding, it's a gut check. You never know how that's gonna turn out. Luckily for us, it turned out well.
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.
I think the script is the key. Regardless of how great everybody else is working on a film, if you're working on a script that you don't think is great, you're not gonna be able to make a great film. Whereas if the script is great, then you can.
I plan to release just as much music as I can. Movies, I should be working on a cartoon, reality show, everything. Everything I could do, like a clothing line, like a lot of things are in the works. I plan on just performing everywhere. I'm gonna be worldwide!
I've been given the tools necessary to be a great musician, a great entertainer, and great person that's gonna inspire everyone.
In most professions, if you stay at the office an extra four hours every day, you're gonna impress the boss. You're gonna get that promotion; you're gonna get that raise. You're gonna at least have job security. But with acting, if you're really ambitious and you have a good work ethic and are really good at your job, it might not really matter.
You know, when I was a kid waiting on the bus, I remember that was when I imagined my life. I imagined everything that I was gonna be when I grew up and I imagined all of these amazing journeys and amazing people I'd meet. Of course, all of it has kind of come to fruition.
A lot of people, for example, live an anxious life. They don't realize they have a super-high level of anxiety. So we're gonna work on really writing down how anxious you feel at the moment you wake up. There's nothing wrong with it; the point is you learn to evaluate yourself and regulate yourself.
I would tell my mom, 'Sit down. I'm gonna play a show for you!' I would just perform. That was always something I loved to do. There was never a question of me doing anything else.
I can never remember a time when I didn't want to be an actress, to be honest. And so, all through high school, I knew that I was gonna go to college in Los Angeles. I just didn't know where. And I knew that I was gonna try to get my theater degree.
I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.
I'm one of those people who can't watch themselves do anything. I could never watch myself wrestle. I've probably watched a handful of my matches. I never could watch myself. Even when I played college basketball, I hated film days... 'Oh God, I'm gonna watch myself screw up.' I'm just one of those people who can't watch their work.
There's no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, 'We're gonna have to clean that up because you don't paint with coffee on a table.'
When I'm looking for a leader who's gonna sit across the negotiating table from a nuclear Iran, or who's gonna be intent on destroying ISIS, I couldn't care less about that leader's temperament or his tone or his vocabulary. Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find.
If you're running a race, and you're looking at the lane to your right or your left, you're gonna trip instead of... focusing forward.
I started off as an Australian model. I had so many knockbacks, having short hair and being rejected, and I always thought: I'm never gonna get to where I want to get unless I start looking more feminine.
I was approached by my agent, who said they were interested in me for 'Mr. Robot'. Then I binge-watched the show, and I was like, 'Uh, I would like this. Show me how I'm gonna fit in there, but yeah, I would love it.'
When you get into this line of work, you're in public office, you expect you're gonna have cheap shots taken at you. That's part of the process.
You can't take our people from Africa and put us in a diaspora and spread us all over the world. And we survived slavery - and we can't pass a test? ... And you're gonna tell me we can't learn how to write? Have you lost your mind? We are survivors. That's all we do is survive.
I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.
Sometimes, you feel like, 'Am I going to be upset about this as a black person or as a woman first? Or am I gonna be both?' Because some things inherently affect black women; some things affect you as a woman and not a black person; and some things just affect you as a black person.
I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.
The further you go, what, I'm gonna wait til I'm 80? Naw, I'm tellin' my story now. I was just moved. I was moved to tell my story. You know? People write books all the time.
I'll never forget when me and Jason Matthews wrote the line, 'Don't be a tape player hater,' in 'Country Man,' I don't think I ever laughed harder. We didn't know where we were gonna put that in a song, but we knew we had to make it into a song. I just remember laughing and being so proud of such a goofy little line.
Literally, I don't know where life is gonna go from one day to the next, and that's as exciting as it is tiring.
