Alicia Keys

What I’m learning is that there is so much to unlearn.

Kindness, love, strength and determination personified!! Madiba reminds me that everything is possible!

I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing.

I feel the presence of a higher power. I believe that what you give is what you get. It’s universal law. I believe in the power of prayer and of words. I’ve learned that when you predict that negative things will happen, they do.

We are a gorgeous, infinite circle of women all shades, all styles, in all the ways we were made. Inside of us everything blooms.

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

I’m surprised Beyonce liked me. I met Beyonce!!

Anyone who doesn’t give [his debut album, The College Dropout] a perfect score is lowering the integrity of the magazine

You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, you’re working without any real feeling.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.

I play as I feel.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.

Sometimes it’s to your advantage for people to think you’re crazy.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.