The study of gender and language might seem at first to be a narrowly focused field, but it is actually as interdisciplinary as they come.

If you understand gender differences in what I call 'conversational style', you may not be able to prevent disagreements from arising, but you stand a better chance of preventing them from spiraling out of control.

This idea that we should be best friends with our partner of the opposite gender leads toward tremendous frustration. Did you ever notice that while men often refer to their wives as best friends, women usually refer to another woman in that way?

An assumption underlying almost all comments on interruptions is that they are aggressive, but the line between what's perceived as assertiveness or aggressiveness almost certainly shifts with an interrupter's gender.

It goes back in the black community that the police are not your friends. That's an old, old, deep understanding that we have, that it's going to take a lot to undo that in our minds.

I was in a comfortable situation, I was on tour, it was cool, but it wasn't at all what I wanted to do. So I had to leave it, start over. My friends were like, ‘You were doing something, now you're back at day one.' So people kind of look at you different when you start over. Everyone needs to challenge themselves like that."

There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that.

What works in a relationship of very public people is not making the relationship public - keeping it as personal as it can be. It's the only way it is real.