I believe that what is legislated bleeds down into everything. So if the legislation continues to uphold anything that doesn't support equal rights and civil rights, that bleeds down into Matthew Shepard being murdered.

In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.

I have a big passion about civil rights for everyone - whoever is being downtrodden at the moment, it doesn't matter: racial discrimination or sexual orientation or gender. Whatever it is, I'm there. I think I was a born civil rights activist. I can't stand the smashing of a community. It's not fair and it's not right.

I grew up in the Deep South, where sexism, racism, and homophobia were and still are alive and well. I have early, early memories of words and actions of this type being very painful.

What I learned about music is that it can have nothing to do with words, instrumentation, image, message, or meaning. The meaning is the melody, the notes, the rhythm - music for the sake of its own beauty, with nothing more required to express itself.

Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn't have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America's poor deserve better than this.

I would be an actress for the rest of my life just because it's really relaxing. Writing is hard work, and stand-up is so stressful before you get on stage, but acting is a complete ensemble experience.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.