I believe when it comes to love, there’s something intangible about who we are attracted to, and I don’t think I have a pattern.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Jesus is a divine guest inside of you all the time – one who loves, understands, sees and hears you. He wants to live in oneness with you… to be the centerpiece of everything you do.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn’t a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

Doo-wop is special music to me because it’s so straightforward and melody-driven and captures emotions.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

I like someone who is a little crazy but coming from a good place. I think scars are sexy because it means you made a mistake that led to a mess.

Most people would rather give than get affection.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

Relationships based on obligation lack dignity.

Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.

Friends are thieves of time.

You don’t want to live your life and then meet someone. You want to share your life with someone. That’s what I’m missing right now.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

If I’d married someone in show business, there’d be too much competition.

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

I wouldn’t say that anyone in fashion is on my side. I don’t think there’s anyone on my side.

‚Young Indiana Jones’ was one of the happiest times I ever had, so I love television.

Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

True friends stab you in the front.

Mine is only one of the millions of hearts broken over the death of Whitney Houston, I will always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, ‚Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.‘

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.

We humans are self-absorbed by nature, and spend most of our time focusing inwardly on our emotions, on our wounds, on our fantasies.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

I’d love to date somebody cool, fun, funny.

I think that you can love people without it being the great love.

I think what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

I believe in the spirit of equality and the spirit of this country as one of love and compassion and kindness.

When I say I’m going to take care of a woman, I don’t just mean physically or sexually or romantically. I’m going to take care of her emotionally and spiritually. I’m going to take care of her in all ways. I take a lot of pride in that today.

Some people love so hard that they can’t control those emotions when they’re at their deepest point.

When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

I was never a boy magnet at school. There was always the girl all the guys liked and wanted to date, but it was never me.

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

I married my best friend that happens to be a girl.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Only the really plain people know about love – the very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression that they soon exhaust their talents.