Missy Elliott

If anybody calls me a female Quincy Jones, that's way, way complimentary. That's something I'll cherish for life.

Things happen in your life, and then you can write something else instead of the same three topics - like, how many times can we write about the clubs?

What my home life is like now is great.

My Struggles is a record close to me. It's about what I went through at home living with an abusive father.

I'm blessed to be living this dream of writing and singing, but that's not the real dream I had. The real dream was to make enough money to take care of all the pain and suffering that my mother has been through.

When I first started in the business, I spent so much! Staying in a Trump Hotel for two years, spending eight Gs a month just living.

I hear a lot of influence from me and Timbaland's whole sound in a lot of records of today. But if you have classics like that, then I'm sure you gotta expect that it's gonna influence some people. So, I'm fine with that.

I remember having mice in the house and my father taking some newspaper and beating me because mice was running on me while I was asleep.

I got a mother who's very strong after taking the whippings that she took from my father.

If I'm paying people, and they're not handling my business right, I have to check them. 'Cause sometimes you're nice, and people don't jump on what they're supposed to do, but if you go in there screaming at everybody - 'Look, why aren't my posters up?' or 'Why wasn't my single out on this day?' - then they jump right on it.

Its funny, because for females in general - not just in music, but the corporate ladder as well - anything we do has always been harder for us. When it comes to music, the industry wants you to conform, to look like this and to sound like this and do this or that. It makes it harder. It's harder for us to come out and be bosses and lead the pack.

I felt like, 'How do I fit in?' But then I never fit in. The whole time, I've never fit in.