Soul music is about longevity and reaching and touching people on a human level - and that's never going to get lost.

I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.

I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'

I was reading poetry to my girlfriends, and they were like, 'You're really good. You should go to some poetry readings or something.' And I eventually went and got a, you know, somewhat of a name for myself and a little bit of a following.

I see myself being a great-grandmother at my great-grandson's graduation from a school that has my name on it.

At my aunt's funeral, I promised myself that I wouldn't be bound by the belief that I'm supposed to stay in anything - whether it's a relationship, a job, a house, or a circumstance - if it makes me miserable. She gave me the courage to find my own happiness.

I didn't leave home until 27. I was an only child raised in Philadelphia by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother controlled the stove. She made a lot of potato meals - mashed potato, potato souffle, potato pancakes. When we didn't have electricity, we ate romantically by candlelight.

To be a queen of a household is a powerful thing.

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem as if we were looking through the gates of Heaven.

Faith is salted and peppered through everything at Christmas. And I love at least one night by the Christmas tree to sing and feel the quiet holiness of that time that's set apart to celebrate love, friendship, and God's gift of the Christ child.

Come Christmas Eve, we usually go to my mom and dad's. Everybody brings one gift and then we play that game when we all steal it from each other. Some are really cool, others are useful and some are a bit out there.

Life goes by really fast, and it seems that there are times when you're burying a lot of friends and family. And then there are times that feel really precious and everybody is doing okay. This is one of those times.

There's a beauty to wisdom and experience that cannot be faked. It's impossible to be mature without having lived.

Every good relationship, especially marriage, is based on respect. If it's not based on respect, nothing that appears to be good will last very long.

I can look at the future with anticipation. And it's comforting to know that someday, as Christians, we'll be able to look back and have a little more clarity on why certain things in life happened.

Thanksgiving Day is a good day to recommit our energies to giving thanks and just giving.

Since I travel so much, it's always great to be home. There's nothing like getting to raid my own refrigerator at two in the morning.

Real relationship is gritty and earthy, the stuff that life is made of.

If you went to your closet today, would you pull out the same outfit you wore 10 or 15 years ago? You wear feelings and faith differently as well.

I just wanted to be a businessman, and to me, the best way to understand business was to be an accountant.

I do think a key to success in any walk of life is having a short memory and a thick skin - I know it has served me well over the years.

I'm quite obsessed with the idea of nailing the girl friendship. It's such an art, so delicate.

Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.

I thought the more famous I became, the more friendships I would have, but the opposite was true.

I have a profound empathy for people who are in the public eye, whether they manifest it themselves or whether it happened by accident - it doesn't matter to me. I think there's a great misunderstanding of what it is to be famous.

Only traumatised people want to be famous.

Part of being famous is offering up this blank screen upon which people can project everything, and it's a sacred act, putting yourself out there, in a way that lots of celebrities aren't steeled for; they're not prepared for the degree to which people define them.

The spirituality that I experience sometimes touches on religion, in that I resonate with the thread of continuity that permeates through all religions. But in terms of it being a concretized, organized part of my life, it's not.

We're taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they're of equal value to happiness, excitement and inspiration.

My greatest environments in which I can grow, or grow up, is in personal romantic relationships with a man.

I did commit to myself that I would not jump back into being the workaholic that I can be before I gave myself an honest opportunity to create the marriage of my dreams and to create the beginning of the family of my dreams, and that took a hot second.

I've just always felt it's an incredibly empowering thing, particularly for young women, to capitalize on their coordination and their strength. It's a very empowering thing to feel strong in your body.

I think a common misperception about attuning and tending to a child's needs so constantly is that they don't grow in their independence, but I think that the opposite is true.

My message to anyone who's afraid that they can't write music when they're happy is 'Just trust the passion.' The passion can write a lot of things.

I didn't want to be one of those women who wake up at 63 years old and realize they've missed the window of opportunity for marriage and children.

I was so ready to become a mom. Actually, I was ready secondarily to become a mom. I was so ready to have the intimacy and commitment of marriage.

I could get away with not taking care of myself as a bachelorette but as a mom I can't.

Peace of mind for five minutes, that's what I crave.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there's been a liberating force that's come from it.

Trauma happens in relationships, so it can only be healed in relationships. Art can't provide healing. It can be cathartic and therapeutic but a relationship is a three-part journey.

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.

I was always such a people-watcher. I would sit on street corners alone and watch people and make up stories about them in my head. Then, all of a sudden, I was the one being watched.

When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

When someone says that I'm angry it's actually a compliment. I have not always been direct with my anger in my relationships, which is part of why I'd write about it in my songs because I had such fear around expressing anger as a woman.

It's a joke to think that anyone is one thing. We're all such complex creatures. But if I'm going to be a poster child for anything, anger's a gorgeous emotion. It gets a bad rap, but it can make great changes happen.

What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O'Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote 'Jagged Little Pill.'