The creative part for me is making songs, and that's what I really love the most, and that's what I've always done for every band I've ever had.
I love dressing up. I have people helping me with it. I am not going to take credit for that. I have a stylist, make-up and hair stylist.
I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates.
I listen to music cinematically. I think about music and how it would make me feel when it's put to an image, a moving image, and I love it.
To me, the real thrill is in making the music, and then I just trust it to find its own audience, and at times it's big and at times it's small, but that's beyond my control.
I still picture myself as a student of the music. I'm always trying to learn new things. Music is just what makes me tick.
There's something in me that loves to inspire people: when I'm playing music, I imagine all this sparkly stardust going through everyone. I want to make people come alive.
I don't listen to music while writing; it seems to me I'm trying to make my own kind of music, and to have anything else going on is just noisy interference.
The potential success that could come with signing with a major label didn't quite outweigh how important it was for me to make my music the way I knew it needed to be made.
Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did, and I'd say, 'Well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical' - but that makes no sense to anyone.
You have to be really strong in the music industry, and I'm naturally very timid. That was really hard for me. You have to be tough. You have to make decisions and be a businesswoman.
I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.
Women are not making it to the top of any profession in the world. But when I say, 'The blunt truth is that men run the world,' people say, 'Really?' That, to me, is the problem.
I was raising a child full time, sharing the responsibility with his mom. He lived with me half the time, so I chose not to go away and make certain movies.
Kids end up seeing my movies anyway but some of the mothers get mad at me so I figured I'd make one that I can't get yelled at for.
Not that it entirely matters: There is a perception that all actors make their movies. A lot of people assume you're responsible. George Clooney told me actors get all of the blame and all the credit.
The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.
I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.
Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way.
Will it make me something? Will I be something? Am I something? And the answer comes, already am, always was, and I still have time to be
I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us.
