My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that's all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn't Mama. Now I've bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be 'sexy,' even before I knew what the word was.

My philosophy is simple: It's a down-home, common, horse-sense approach to things.

They say somebody's 'street smart.' I feel like, if I got intelligence, it's just a country smart.

My father died in France, and my sisters and I went over with my mum to bring back his body. I remember going to the funeral parlour in France and being given a laminated menu of coffins, and thinking, surely there is an ice cream at the back of here!

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

A lot of my close friends are musicians and are consumed by the idea of death; their heads are like a torture chamber. I’m not like that - I don’t have death anxiety and I don’t think about it all the time.

He not busy being born is busy dying.