You
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It's rare for artists to really stare deeply at themselves in the mirror, literally, because there's constantly a mirror on you.
Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.
To be at acting school, it was kind of the first time you felt the freedom to be as much of yourself as you wanted. People weren't going to judge you.
I've always been jealous of rappers, because they can fit so many words into a song and tell a story with lots of details. But when you're a songwriter, you have to fit the words to the melody and you can't fit as much in. I'm just a big fan of storytelling.
Some people ask, 'Why the word 'feminist'? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?' Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general — but to choose to use the vague expression 'human rights' is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.
In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.
There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer — or maybe president.
You cannot define a person on just one thing. You can't just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done because one thing didn't come off the way you thought it should come off.
Sam Cooke had a huge influence on me. He left the gospel field at one point and went into the secular, and he had this huge hit, 'You Send Me'. Irma, my older sister, and I heard 'You Send Me' on the radio while we were driving through the South one night. We had to stop the car. We got out and danced around the car out on the highway.
The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.
With age, you see people fail more. You see yourself fail more. How do you keep that fearlessness of a kid? You keep going. Luckily, I'm not afraid to make a fool of myself.
I've always felt that if you back down from a fear, the ghost of that fear never goes away. It diminishes people.
When you dance, your body just wants to find its natural weight. I'm naturally a lot more Tommy Tune than I am Wolverine.
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
When you feel that the way you interpret the world is fairly idiosyncratic, you can feel somewhat ostracized and lonely.
It's not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we're not good enough, that we must live up to someone else's standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am.
You can be right or you can be happy.
You must remain focused on your journey to greatness.
Don't let someone else's opinion of you become your reality.
You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.
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