I'm a spiritual person and a religious person. But for me, it's all a personal thing. I'm not someone who'll say, 'This is what I believe, and you should too!' It's more of an internal, quiet, grounded, fulfilling thing for me.
The most personal thing about me is my music. The most honest, pure thing in my whole life.
Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me.
You know me, I'm not that kind of person that cares to unveil all of my personal things to the world because frankly, in terms of my soccer, it doesn't matter.
Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things.
My personal trainer suggested paleo to build muscle while staying lean, and it's one of the first plans that's worked for me.
I am lucky enough to be married to a personal trainer. He's able to whip me into shape pretty quickly.
I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren't the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.
So I'm writing more highly personalized and intellectual music, and I think that's good. It might take longer to find me, but I think that niche is perhaps underserved, so I'm going to serve that.
The older I get, the more important the eternal becomes to me personally.
There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.
This wealth of experiences, personal and professional, have helped me appreciate the variety of perspectives that present themselves in every case that I hear.
I don't view myself as a musician anymore - I view myself as a human being that functions as a musician when I'm functioning as a musician, but that's not 24 hours a day. That's really opened me up to even more perspectives because now I look at music, not from the standpoint of being a musician, but from the standpoint of being a human being.
I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.
At 15, I knew someone whose mother cooked macrobiotic, so I persuaded my mother to go macrobiotic with me.
I am good at persuading people. In convincing the other, I try to start from their point of view so it's easier for me to find a common denominator.
The best part of success is that it got me past the basic survival level of existence so that I was comfortable. I didn't have to worry about stuff pertaining to survival. Once that was taken care of, I got the chance sit down and create and work at what I do.
I don't want to get embroiled in any controversy. At the same time, I want to take part in those conversations that are meaningful. I have not entrusted anyone to reply on behalf or react to any issue pertaining to me.
Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
It's very limited what women who look like me can do on television. You don't often see 'my type' on television unless she's a sidekick - certainly not a three-dimensional series regular who is pertinent to the plot.
