I can't record in the morning because I sound like...

Although becoming a singer was my plan A after first hearing Whitney Houston when I was 17, I started off with plan B by going to the teacher-training college that my dad went to. It was a slow coming of age.

Dating is different when you get older. You're not as trusting, or as eager to get back out there and expose yourself to someone.

But I don't want to be out there anymore I don't want people asking me about my health issues, about my kids. I choose not to be a public paparazzi girl on purpose.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.