I'm cute - and God I hate that. Because that's not cool. I'm like your niece, and nobody wants to date their niece. It's the chubby cheeks. The whole reason people voted for me on American Idol is because I'm an everyday, normal girl.

My friends and family are my support system. They tell me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear and they are there for me in the good and bad times. Without them I have no idea where I would be and I know that their love for me is what's keeping my head above the water.

The thing I love most about going on vacation is that I get to leave behind any kind of schedule. My entire life is scheduled from morning to night, and when I'm on vacation, there is no schedule.

The question I love to get asked is: 'What's the hardest part of your job?' And literally, the answer is probably real sad, but it's to just to be me. Like, it's really hard, because I think people, you know, have a set idea of what a pop star should be.

God will never give you anything you can't handle, so don't stress.

There is no greater feeling than hanging out with my dogs, or just walking around the land with our horses. My rescue ranch is is where I feel the most at peace and where I'm reminded of the simple things in life and let the chaos of my crazy work life fade away.

I'm actually not a big fan of the word hope. I think it's a depressing word. I don't want to hope - I want to know. Like I don't hope there's a God, I know there's a God.

I love healthy stuff and junk an equal amount. Whatever I'm craving, I go for it. I'm never trying to lose weight - or gain it. I'm just being.

Almost any American can connect on some level to a family background of having come across some ocean. They say, 'My great-grandparents came from wherever... this is why we have this last name, why we do this thing at Christmas.' All the details get watered down but don't quite disappear.

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now.

I'm bound to fail when I write in Italian, but unlike my sense of failure in the past, this doesn't torment or grieve me.

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down.

You can't have a hit every time. The main thing is to keep on working and not be afraid to take risks. It's better to do something that's not perfect and successful every time. It's important to be fearless and move forward, to learn from what went wrong.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

Christmas makes everything twice as sad.

Handmade presents are scary because they reveal that you have too much free time.

I began doing writing projects and art and design projects to explore a new way of seeing Canada. Roots is one more way of continuing this exploration. I want to present a wide-open Canadian sense of color, adventure, communication and openness that defines our country.

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts.

Forget about being world famous, it's hard enough just getting the automatic doors at the supermarket to acknowledge our existence.

Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.

Big companies are like marching bands. Even if half the band is playing random notes, it still sounds kind of like music. The concealment of failure is built into them.

If a building looks better under construction than it does when finished, then it's a failure.

Sometimes failure isn't an opportunity in disguise, it's just you.

Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.

People are pretty forgiving when it comes to other people's families. The only family that ever horrifies you is your own.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.

Workshops and seminars are basically financial speed dating for clueless people.

Flying dreams mean that you're doing the right thing with your life.

Everybody past a certain age, regardless of how they look on the outside, pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives.

Even when you take a holiday from technology, technology doesn't take a break from you.

It feels wistful to imagine a time when people didn't go about their daily routine with the assumption that at any moment another massive media technology will be dumped on us by some geek in California.

Technology favors horrible people.

The time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

Before machines the only form of entertainment people really had was relationships.

Men won't read any email from a woman that's over 200 words long.

Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody's talking about these 100-hour movies called 'Breaking Bad'. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is 'Breaking Bad.'

I've had maybe 20 jobs, big and small, and I've never hated any of them. At the same time, the moment the learning curve flattened, I was out of there.

The capacity for not feeling lonely can carry a very real price, that of feeling nothing at all.

I think that to acknowledge a new generation is to acknowledge some degree of obsolescence in yourself, and that is very hard to do and often comes with undeniable anger.

If cats were double the size they are now, they'd probably be illegal.

If human beings had genuine courage, they'd wear their costumes every day of the year, not just on Halloween.

I was always the youngest person in class, skinny, scrawny, no good at sports. I asserted myself by being smart. But then I got to college and started to get C's and D's. That was fantastic. I no longer had to be the smartest person in the room.

To have a healthy culture, you have to have stable health care financing and stable arts financing and stable sports financing, and if you don't have that, your culture becomes a parking lot.