Quotes from Erykah Badu

Hip-hop is the people. What the people are moving toward is what hip-hop is. I think people are moving toward a freer way of thinking. Openness.

I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically. Vitally.

What I work hard at doing is staying on a path of being kind and showing and proving that I'm a good person to society. That's hard. The talent, that's a gift. I just came here like that.

I don't plan how many people I work with. I don't charge anything. It's for my own learning, and I just enjoy being the welcoming committee. I became a doula by default.

[Riccardo Tisci ] has an interesting approach to weaving the contemporary with the couture, and blending tribes and collections. It always seems to work.

Through [my children] patience, they're showing me how much they support what's going on, because I'm having to do a lot of work right now.

Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.

All I want to do is give the world my heart... Record label tryina make me compromise my art.

I take the same approach in all genres of art, across the board. It's intuitive.

I think we [with Riccardo Tisci] share a sensibility about art - we pull from the ancient future.

I've been a vegetarian since I was 19.

I figure, if the mind just 'has' to be busy, why not make up happy shit?

But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.

Don't let anybody infiltrate your dream

I grew up listening to old soul.

I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

I really can't say what inspires me the most, because I'm inspired by just about everything. My feelings and relationships, my family, Scooby-Doo. Opinion of my work. Everything. Not just one thing.

I lived in New York for maybe a year and a half, from '95 to '97, but I live in Dallas. My whole family is there.

They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another.

Art is the absence of fear.

This pain to remain the same outweigh the pain to change... When you get tired enough is when you begin to want to sacrifice everything inside of you—the fear just leaves

Vegan food is soul food in its truest form. Soul food means to feed the soul. And, to me, your soul is your intent. If your intent is pure, you are pure.

I know the community mostly for its art and culture... and of course its food, I eat at their restaurants." "They make you feel like taking off your shoes... it feels like home.