Alicia Keys

As I grow and I get older I’m realising more and more that there’s such a beautiful, sensual power that we have as women.

How incredible our ancestors were. The first astrophysicists, scientists, physicians, mathematicians, architects, creators of so much of the world as we know it. It’s a blessing to know what cloth you’re cut from!

Sometimes, I want some damn makeup, and I’m going to wear it! Guess what — if I want to wear red lipstick and put eyelashes on, I can do whatever I f**king want. I am the creator of my own destiny,

It’s my nature to downplay.

I always feel excited when I can do something that’s about what I believe in.

To all my goddesses in the world spreading love and light, power and radiance. Never stop being brilliant!!

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

All music is beautiful.

Music and song are, in my opinion, so fine and necessary a part of life that without them we cannot be said really to live at all.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.

The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I’ve also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.

Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.