Growing up, there was a lot of pressure for women to be good-looking, but my mum was very strict, and she didn't allow me to wear make-up. Looking back, it was good for me. It slowed me down from becoming an adult too quickly.

I didn't really know many girls, growing up, because there weren't many other people living around where I lived.

Not everybody wanted a female to be the front face of a big band, you know... You had to be three times better than a man had to be.

I lived in buses. I didn't really have anything else. I didn't feel like a female, and I ended up really kind of isolated. Everybody thinks you're so happy and so wealthy and such a big star, but you're really kind of lonely and don't know how to stop it.

My journey started with the understanding that poor parents share the universal desire for education for their children. No family in our experience has ever turned down educational support for their daughter.

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.

I learned to glitter the pumpkins for Halloween not because I went into it thinking, 'I'm going to glitter some pumpkins!' No. I bought all of these big, cold, slimy, disgusting pumpkins and tried to carve them, and it was gross, so I had to find something else to do with them. Glitter was life-changing.

Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.