When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.

When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

In the music industry, intelligence in women is undervalued.

An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.

If we don't empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children - for the first time in American history, truly the first time - will not have the same economic opportunities.

I didn't go to a business school. I didn't really study it.

Talent has no gender. People are hiring young male directors right out of film school, off of a student film or off of a film at Sundance for millions of dollars. You can do the same with a female. It's not a risk about the work if you respect the film that they made.

Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.