Quotes About Inspiration

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

My boys asked me to write beautiful letters for their ex-girls so they could get them back. I thought, 'I should be writing songs for myself.'

It's all about letting the story take over.

I liked the idea of being a writer and letting somebody else do the graft.

'Black girl magic' means, to me, just getting out there and doing it every day and not letting anything get you down.

My music is not always about getting my ideas heard, it's about letting other people feel empowered to have their ideas heard by example.

We lost my dad in 2009 to leukemia. He taught me everything I know, and I love him very much.

Working with Uniqlo is probably the most incredible template of democracy in fashion, and it's nice that my design can be accessible to anyone, on all different levels.

Busking taught me so much on so many levels, not just about being a musician or writing songs - actually about growing up and being a human!

I've always thought Juliette Lewis was great.

Leona Lewis made some really nice albums.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

I feel liberated being around women who are liberated.

Music liberated me.

I think I am more liberated as an artiste in my late 40s.

I'm a person who values excellence, freedom and liberation.

I wanted to be a librarian.

Public libraries were a huge source of comfort and joy for me when I was growing up. I still spend time there.

As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books.

You can spend a day in a library and feel: 'Great, I've done a day's work.' But it's only research, not writing.

I dropped off my kids from 10 to 2, went to the library, and just wrote. This is my second career - I'm 41 - and I'm a terrible speller.

Every writer I know got their start in a library somewhere. We read a book, and we thought, 'I want to do that.'

Without the library, I would have been lost.

But one of the most enjoyable things for me is that running for office gives you this license to enter the world of somebody else and to hear about the dreams that they have for themselves, for their family, for the country.