“Only write from your own passion, your own truth. That's the only thing you really know about, and anything else leads you away from the pulse.”

“Your thoughts will only lead you astray, leading you away from the truth as long as you harden your heart from the fact that you are filled with limitations. And the hardness of your heart will make your soul fall into the abyss of destruction.”

“I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t think there’s a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I’ve written, that didn’t have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can’t write about someone else’s voice. You can only write in your own.”

“If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself”

“Embrace your differences and the qualities about you that you think are weird. Eventually they’re going to be the only things separating you from everyone else. ”

“Nobody can tell you that you are content until you feel it in your own heart. When a heart is okay, then it’s a heartfelt feeling and you know it. Not by the virtue of somebody having to tell you this, somebody having to explain you this, but it comes from the feeling of the inside. Knowledge works from the inside out, not from the outside in. Your own experience is the only thing that’ll satisfy that thirst.”

“Sitting and writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from. It is like having a mirror held up in front of you, looking into yourself and asking these questions.”

“I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal.”

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

“You can't love anyone or anything until you love your own existence first. Love can only grow out of a respect for your own life.”