Pastoral Resources

Passion has always been important to me. That won't change. What changes in a woman's perspective. I mean, I have two kids now. I'm a single parent balancing motherhood and my career. That changes the equation.

I wanted to do Playboy to get across the same ideas I'm singing and writing about these days. It's all about proving that a woman can defy stereotypes.

I always make this joke that I know you were expecting to see the big skirts and the hoops. But that was a long time ago. Artists aren't always seen as real people. If you start out as a teenager, sometimes people want to keep you locked as that. But I'm a woman now.

The music business is very hard on women over 22. You really have to prove yourself every time you make a record. Are you as vibrant as you used to be? Are you as sexy? So I really want to prove that a woman in her 30s can be all those things and more.

I want to try and do as much as I can as an actor. So far I think I've done pretty well with being a minister's son. And now I know I'm pretty darn good at playing a woman too.

I'm a tomboy now. I always wanted to fit in with my brother's group, so I climbed trees and played with lead soldiers. But I'm a woman's woman. I never understood women who don't have woman friends.

It's always nerve-racking to take off your clothes on film. But doing it with a woman felt safer than with a man. You know you can say, 'Don't grab me there: That's where my cellulite is'!

You won't find me in a romantic comedy. Those movies don't speak to me. People don't come to talk to me about those scripts, because they probably think I'm this dark, twisted, miserable person.

What is youth except a man or woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?

I don't think having a My Chemical Romance action figure will make a kid start his own band, I like to think it will make him save children from a burning building.

The performance of a lifetime is the perfect thing to be doing at this age because I can use the age.

I don't think I'll ever escape the fact that I don't belong anywhere in particular. I've often dreamed about going back to Nigeria, but that's a very romantic notion. It's a hideous country to go to in reality.

Two years ago I hadn't even thought of the Woman in White, and I was doing a television show and I said I hadn't found a story and the next day somebody rang me and said have you ever thought of the Woman in White.

I would have gone right ahead but the only thing, the only phenomenon that's going on now of course, which is different in my experiences, is that you are getting things planted in the Net by people about the Woman in White on the Net. That's not a nice change.

If a man is talking in the forest, and there is no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

The bottom line always remains the same: What is the basic humanity of the character? How do I make them resonate with the reader?

When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.

No man wants to feel that he's there because of his woman's biological clock or because he's filling a job opening for husband or significant other.