Throughout the years, many Christian women have told me of their great respect for the bravery and courage evident in my work, perhaps even gesturing to their own Isis earrings or a Nile River Goddess pendants.
Karate probably gave me an incredibly deep awareness of all the parts of me, my flexibility, and the nimble qualities I'm doing, even if they're unconscious.
I loved her music and the fact that she was a classically trained pianist and that her voice was so unique, but what made Nina Simone my hero is that I had never seen anyone in the public eye who looked anything like me at all, ever.
When I got with Nina Greenberg, I had been running for a few months already without a trainer. But then she gave me a program and guided me through my runs, showing me how to take care of myself and letting me know I should ice my legs and stretch - stuff I hadn't been doing.
I think it all started with Nina Simone. When I was maybe seven or eight, I used to listen to one of her albums every night before I went to sleep. For me, her voice was everything.
I think Nina Simone has had an amazing journey. She was spicy and she had attitude and she didn't care, she wanted her money in a paper bag and don't mess with me and I've been doing some research on that so.
The artist who gave me the most inspiration and direction, especially as a singer - and I absolutely consider myself a singer, 100 percent - is Nina Simone. She's my ultimate pianist-singer-type person.
I did a project called 'Sing The Truth,' which was a lot of fun. It started out being a celebration of the music of Nina Simone, and it was me and Lizz Wright and Angelique Kidjo.
The male singers who had the same range I did, when I was growing up, didn't do much for me. But put on Nina Simone, Carmen McRae or Nancy Wilson, and I'd be in seventh heaven. Female vocalists just did more with their voices, and that's why I paid more attention to them.
Movies require a lot of patience. I like instant results. If I have done something that's not funny at all, the audience will let me know in two seconds. With the movie, I will have to wait nine months to know if I was that bad.
There were nineteen years between my grandparents, and I was in a relationship for five years from the age of fifteen to twenty with a man who was thirteen years older than me who remains one of the loves of my life, and he passed away when I was twenty years old.
When I was nineteen years old, I was the number-one star for two years. When I was forty, nobody wanted me. I couldn't get a job.
There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He's very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.
To me, Scorpio was a big bet and a quantum leap in the kind of sophistication of our products. People forget that, apart from the Bolero and the Armada, until the nineties we never made hard-top vehicles.
Ninety percent of the people who come to see me are my fans.
Movie acting suits me because I only need to be good for ninety seconds at a time.
I was glad to be sober, but after ninety days, people weren't patting me on the back anymore, sayin', 'Good job on the sobriety! Go get 'em!'
Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.
All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe and just side of a question is the generous and merciful side.
Ninety-nine percent of people now call me The Hoff - and it's out of respect.
