People tend to complicate things in life.
I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.
For me, keeping it simple is the best way to live life, to not complicate things, to sort of keep things in perspective.
Critics try to pin so many different inaccuracies on me and my music; they look at the complicated things and try to simplify them. They think they can nail your whole life down just by knowing the bare bones of your history in partaking in 10 minutes of conversation.
I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that's my perception of life.
Writers are always writing about infidelity. It's so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you're also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it's just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.
I work more now because at this time of my life I am not disturbed from my aim by outside pressures such as family, passionate relationships, dealing with 'who am I?' - those complications when one is searching for one's self.
When we live the 21st-century good life, almost every aspect of it is predicated on not looking at the implications of what we're up to. Happiness at this point has a lot to do with not looking, so you don't feel complicit in some vast and awful enterprise.
So many girls come up and say to me, 'I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn't even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I'm obsessed.' That's the coolest compliment to me.
If anybody calls me a female Quincy Jones, that's way, way complimentary. That's something I'll cherish for life.
There are only three things women need in life: food, water, and compliments.
I probably get strangers coming up to me two or three times a week to just say something nice. I get more than my share of compliments as I walk through my daily life. I'm not having to show off or make a point about how good I am at doing something. I think I've always kind of been that way.
Before anything else, I'm a Muslim. As a Muslim, I try to comply with the requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep it private.
It's the oldest story in human existence. We've colonized someone or been colonized throughout human history. It's amazing how fast we comply and try to get a life out of that.
The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.
To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young... he killed himself in the prime of his life.
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
