Quotes About Inspiration

I just want to spearhead and lead a new style of New Orleans music.

Since I'm born here, my music will always have some New Orleans elements.

If I have to be considered any type of jazz artist, it would be New Orleans jazz because New Orleans jazz never forgot that jazz is dance music and jazz is fun. I'm more influenced by that style of jazz than anything else.

New Orleans is like my blood; it's not going anywhere. And then I just take different things that I've learned over the years and add them to what I'm doing with the natural New Orleans sound.

I need New Orleans. And New Orleans needs me.

New Orleans made me who I am.

My mom was an orphan, and there was never anybody to tell her what she could or couldn't do. At the core, she's probably an artist - an artist and a feminist.

I love creating opportunities for people. I think it's my orphan mentality.

I'd seen 'Punky Brewster,' I'd seen 'Webster,' I saw 'Annie,' and it was time to either be an orphan or an actress.

We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

Many of the girls who were in the orphanage with me became either nurses or social workers.

Before I pass, I want to start an orphanage and name it after my mother. She worked with kids all her life.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!

Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.

I grew up in adoration of writers like Hemingway, George Orwell, Anna Akhmatova, and that has always been my idea about the artist - that you have to be a brave and freedom-loving person.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

My father had inklings of my cultural aspirations. He would take me to the library, things like that. But he wasn't one of those dads who had read George Orwell and was a member of the Communist party. We had no books at home.

Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen's wonderful - this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.

I've always been fascinated by Oscar Wilde.

If you think about it, I made history. Not only was I the first black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar, I was the first black British person.

Getting the Oscar had the biggest impression on me.

'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

If they didn't have an Oscar for people to shoot for, all they'd do is be making 'Dumb And Dumber' again and again.