My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.

During the 'ballad' years for me, the politics was latent; I was just falling in love with the ballads and my boyfriend. And there was the beauty of the songs.

The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.

That's all nonviolence is - organized love.

My day-to-day local issues are rooted in an underlying fear of death.

In my house, we couldn't listen to 'Love to Love You Baby.' It was way too salacious back in the day. I remember my mom would turn the station off when that song came on the radio. But, of course, I played my album to death in my bedroom, with the door closed.

Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a post-mortem dissection of all the perceived flaws the celebrity had.

The film 'The Queen' came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana's death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.