Women Singers

"I truly believe the reason why there is a demand for rom-coms is because humans, whether its conscious or subconscious, have a need to feel happy and to see love."

"I love acting. Modeling is fun, too, but I feel like there is more room to stretch yourself and open yourself up to new experiences with acting. That's why I got into acting in the first place."

"No one writes each other letters anymore, but I think there's something so special about receiving a really heartfelt letter, still."

"When you're the only woman of color, and you walk into a room of people who don't look like you, most of them with blond hair and blue eyes, it's disheartening. The weirdest part is that I walk in and assume they think I'm auditioning to play a different role than them, but I'm going out for their same role."

"I've grown up with racism my entire life. I've been bullied, sent to the hospital, beat up, I've been called a Chink and a Gook. Every single racial slur an Asian person can be called, I've been called it."

"I grew up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and used to dream that I would grow up to be just like her. In a way, Teen Wolf has a lot of those kinds of characters. We're just kids by day, and yet we're trying to fight demons and werewolves and bad people and save people that we love."

"If you are friends with someone, and you're like 'Hey, what ethnicity are you,' that's cool. But you wouldn't walk up to a white person and say, 'What kind of white are you?'"

"What if the Internet breaks tomorrow? Then you'd realize that you're a human being, and you're not validated by what other people think of you - it's how you think of yourself."

"I always feel like people misunderstand the difference between an Asian story and an Asian-American story. That's completely different, too. I have friends who grew up in Asia, and our experiences are so different. Even though we might look the same, I feel like being Asian and then being Asian-American is completely different."

"When I was a kid, I honestly never thought about race. I didn't see differences."

"There's a misconception that I can't relate to the quote-unquote 'Asian-American experience' because I didn't grow up with an Asian mom and dad. And that's just not true. I am Asian American, and so playing a girl who is half Korean, half white, but her white dad tried really hard to connect with her mom's heritage - that's very familiar to me."

"My parents would dress us up in traditional Vietnamese clothing to go to school for heritage day. We have a Vietnamese nanny that my parents wanted us to have so we could stay in touch and know where we came from."

"When you do action stuff and sci-fi stuff, you have a lot to hide behind - the hair and the makeup and the special effects. But when you play a normal girl, it's challenging because you have to trust yourself."

"Whenever I meet someone new, I always extend a hand and say, 'Hi I'm Lana Condor... Condor like the ugly endangered bird.' I like to see how people react to that and if they laugh and, indeed, know what a condor is... chances are we're going to get along just fine!"

"I wanted to go to college to be a journalist and follow in my dad's work. And then I became an actor."

"I believe that when you leave one genre and become a performer of another, things change. I have been part of the relatively new movement where you come out with a salsa record, for instance, and the anticipated hit comes with a ballad version and another pop version. I like that because this way I can reach many more people who may otherwise be limited by the genre."

"I was writing my own songs and when I was younger, all I wanted to do was perform, so when I said ‘this is what I want to do’, mum and dad were very sceptical. But they were really supportive and I think I’m lucky to have grown up around people who are as passionate about music as I am. And they understand and support me, which is… well I’m really lucky."

"Artists like Nina Simone and James Baldwin, who were able to create work that really spoke about the conditions facing Black people and work that would remain universal contributions to culture—something that would continue to shape generations."

"I’ve been inspired by the profound and timeless writings of James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and Nina Simone."

"When I say poet, it's an arbitrary word. It's a word I use because I don't like the word artist. Nina Simone is a poet...There is a whole list of people. I'm not talking about literature at all. I'm talking about the recreation of experience, you know, the way that it comes back...And if you could bear it, then you could begin to change it. That's what a poet does. I'm not talking about books. I'm talking about a certain kind of passion, a certain kind of energy which people produce and they secrete in certain people like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Max Roach because they need it and these people give it back to you and they get you from one place to another."

"Still mildly under the influence of 2-CB, I reflected on the evening and my time at Boom. In the background, Nina Simone was singing her soul-wrenching song "Why?," which laments the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Something about the combination of 2-CB-related effects and Nina's heartfelt voice made me feel the song as if for the very first time, even though I had listened to it since I was a child. I was able to make connections between the love and freedom King advocated for everyone and the love and freedom we all experienced at Boom: it came down to the protection of personal liberty and the unalienable right to pursue happiness. The Portuguese government has taken a step in the right direction with its drug-decriminalization policy. The U.S. government, by contrast, has yet to stand up to the promise of the Declaration of Independence. Nina asked earnestly, "Will my country fall, stand or fall? Is it too late for us all?""

"Right now I'm as close to happy as I can be without a husband to love, I started to work on this book, looking back over a life which, after thinking about for months and months, I have no regrets about. Plenty of mistakes, some bad days, and, most resonant of all, years of joy - hard, but joyous all the same - fighting for the rights of my brothers and sisters everywhere; America, Africa, all over the world, years where pleasure and pain were mixed together. I knew then, and I still do, that the happiness I felt, and still feel, as we moved forward together was of a kind that very few people ever experience. But what I like most of all about the way things are now is that I have enough financial security to know that I can't be pushed into doing anything I don't want to. When I release a new album or video it'll be because I'm proud and want to share it - no other reason. (p 175)"

"The president, LBJ, went on TV to declare 7 April a Day of National Mourning. This was the same man who had ordered thousands of US citizens - black and white - overseas to die in a foreign jungle while he ignored the war at home. Our president was obviously a man of violence. Why shouldn't the rest of us be the same?"

"As I became more knowledgeable I came to my own conclusions about separatism. In the white man's world the black man would always lose out, so the idea of a separate black nation, whether it was in America or in Africa, made sense. But I didn't believe that there was any basic difference between the races - whoever is on top uses whatever means they can to keep the other down, and if black America was on top they'd use race as a way of oppressing whites in exactly the way they themselves were oppressed. Anyone who has power only has it at the expense of someone else and to take that power away from them you have to use force, because they'll never give it up from choice. That is what I came to believe, and it was a big step forward in my political thinking because I realized that what we were really fighting for was the creation of a new society. When I had started out in the movement all I wanted were my rights under the Constitution, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that no matter what the President or the Supreme Court might say, the only way we could get true equality was if America changed completely, top to bottom. And this change had to start with my own people, with black revolution."

"It was at this time, in the mid-sixties, that I first began to feel the power and spirituality I could connect with when I played in front of an audience. I'd been performing for ten years, but it was only at this time that I felt a kind of state of grace come upon me on those occasions when everything fell into place. At such times I would give a concert that everyone who witnessed it would remember for years, and they would go home afterwards knowing that something very special had happened. Those moments are very difficult for a performer to explain. It's like being transported in church; something descends upon you and you are gone, taken away by a spirit that is outside of you...That's what I learned about performing - that it was real, and I had the ability to make people feel on a deep level. It's difficult to describe because it's not something you can analyse; to get near what it's about you have to play it. And when you've caught it, when you've got the audience hooked, you always know because it's like electricity hanging in the air. I began to feel it happening and it seemed to me like mass hypnosis - like I was hypnotizing an entire audience to feel a certain way. I was the toreador mesmerizing this bull and I could turn around and walk away, turning my back on this huge animal which I knew would do nothing because I had it under my complete control. And, like they did with the toreadors, people came to see me because they knew I was playing close to the edge and one day I might fail. This was how I got my reputation as a live performer, because I went out from the mid-sixties onwards determined to get every audience to enjoy my concerts the way I wanted them to, and if they resisted at first I had all the tricks to bewitch them with."

"Often you don't know how truly happy you were then until you look back and realize how much worse things could have been, how if certain things had turned out the slightest bit differently so many of your favourite people would never have crossed your path and what seemed at the time to be casual meetings and passing acquaintances would never have matured into deep, lifelong friendships. I've criss-crossed the world many times and every big city holds its own treasure-box of memories. I've had lovers from many different countries and I've fallen in love with whole countries, and, in the case of Africa, with a whole continent. People say you should measure yourself by the friends you have, and when I look at mine I'm more than content to be me. Through my life I made a world for myself just as Jimmy said I would, and the best thing of all is that I'm still happy to live in it, after all these years. (Prologue)"

"Because of 'Porgy' people often compared me to Billie Holiday, which I hated. That was just one song out of my repertoire, and anybody who saw me perform could see we were entirely different. What made me mad was that it meant people couldn't get past the fact we were both black: if I had happened to be white nobody would have made the connection. And I didn't like to be put in a box with other jazz singers because my musicianship was totally different, and in its own way superior. Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be. It was a racist thing; 'If she's black she must be a jazz singer.' It diminished me, exactly like Langston Hughes was diminished when people called him a 'great black poet'. Langston was a great poet period, and it was up to him and him alone to say what part the colour of his skin had to do with that."

"Hound dogs on my trail/School children sitting in jail/Black cat cross my path/I think every day's gonna be my last/Don't tell me, I'll tell you/Me and my people just about due/I've been there so I know/They keep on saying "Go slow!""

"Picket lines, school boycotts/They try to say it's a communist plot/All I want is equality/For my sister, my brother, my people, and me"

"I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart/Remove all the bars that keep us apart/I wish you could know what it means to be me/Then you'd see and agree/That everyone should be free/But, oh, I'm just a soul whose intentions are good/Oh, Lord, please, don't let me be misunderstood"

"the world is big/Big and bright and round/And it's full of folks like me/Who are black, yellow, beige and brown"

"Well I wish I could be like a bird in the sky/How sweet it would be/If I found I could fly/I'd soar to the sun/And look down at the sea/And I sing 'cause I know/How it feels to be free"

"What kept me sane was knowing that things would change, and it was a question of keeping myself together until they did."

"Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash/Just who do you think I am?/You raise my taxes, freeze my wages/And send my son to Vietnam/You give me second class houses/And second class schools/Do you think that all colored folks/Are just second class fools?"

"I was researching Mrs Brown’s Boys and found that, with music hall, Laurel and Hardy, Les Dawson, Dick Emery and so on, more men had played working-class women in British comedy than women. [...] That's up until Victoria Wood. She almost single-handedly changed that. She and Billy Connolly essentially prepared the way for alternative comedy and the rise of the stand-up — bridging the gap between the working men's clubs and the comedy clubs. Before her, funny women were from a rarefied sphere like Joyce Grenfell. Wood spoke the way real people spoke and she was hugely successful. She made it possible for Tracey Ullman, even Peter Kay, to think a career was possible."

"We never talked about men or clothes or inconsequential things we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution - real girls' talk."

"I don’t say 'who'. I do say 'whom'. I never use the toilet, just the smallest room. I don't say gay. I still say queer. I think that Mussolini had the right idea."

"This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it."

"I once went to one of those parties where everyone throws their car keys into the middle of the room. I don’t know who got my moped but I’ve been driving that Peugeot for years."

"When you're in the middle of having a baby, it's a bit like watching two very inefficient removal men, trying to get a very large sofa through a very small doorway. Only in this case you can't say, "Oh sod it, bring it through the French windows"."

"When the poets rhyme in the summertime/You'll hear melodies in the words"

"[Asked if being interviewed is a form of torture for her] No, people always think I hate doing interviews. I don't. I wouldn't do them if I didn't like them. I have to say that at the start of every interview."

"[On remaining unattached after a divorce] Well, I think there's not much of a chance for me finding somebody of my age. Gentlemen of my age are dropping down 30 years to find girlfriends. [Informed: "That's not always the case."] You're right. I need to get out of the house."

"[On a difficult relationship with her mother, Helen] If she'd only gone out to work, we would all have been a lot happier. Being in the house drove her mad. She hated housework, cooking. She'd go into the garden and chop down trees. She was full of energy and batting against the walls with it. And this gave me a real sense that you had to have your own life. It's ridiculous to stay at home with your children if it drives you nuts. Children would much rather see a happy, smiley person come back."

"[Song]] Not bleakly, Not meekly Beat me on the bottom with the Woman's Weekly Let's do it, let's do it tonight!"

"I was just thinking as Alan [Bennett] and I walked up the steps, how nice it would have been if one of us had come up in a stairlift."

"The Italians have got opera, the Spanish have got flamenco dancing. What have we got? Weight Watchers."

"Sometimes I think that being widowed is God's way of telling you to come off the pill."

"Where are you in the menstrual cycle? Taurus."

"[Asked if she ever had childhood holidays in Blackpool] No. What do you take me for? We used to go to Vienna."