“I questioned every day whether I could make it. I questioned every day whether this was the right thing to do. I questioned every day whether I belonged. I studied really hard, I worked really hard, but also could not have gotten through without the encouragement of people whose advice I really trusted and really valued.”
“I think when you have a level of confidence, it allows you to share your ideas and to, once you’ve sort of created something from an idea and it works, you just never stop. You just keep going.”
“I wanted to rap because I liked how, as a woman, you could rap and if you were good, your voice commanded respect ... people respected your body, they respected your personality, they respected who you were as a person.”
“I am who I am, and the more vulnerable we are, the more we share ourselves, the more we are genuine with one another, the more we can touch and help others.”
“I think you can have a really great life and make a lot of contributions if you accept that there’s an element of compromise, that it’s all going to be a little half-assed.”
“There’s such a fascination with how women in our culture manage to balance things, and women are so often asked, ‘Gee, you’re a wife and a mom, and how do you do it?’ ... It should never be asked, or it should be asked of everyone, and if anything, I wish that more and more men in these creative fields are asked, ‘How do you do it? What sacrifices are you asked to make?’?”
“I think there’s a need for this kind of thing in a lot of women’s lives. I know exactly how hard I can hit. There are a lot of women out there who don’t know how hard they can hit. It’s a wonderful thing to know. It’s very empowering.”
“[Ageism] played in a lot, in two different ways: In ways that people thought that there was no way I could get this done because I was so young, and/or they sort of fetishized it. Like, ‘Oh my god, she’s so young.’?”
“I haven’t changed. I’ve learned a lot of lessons, but I never learned the lesson of restraining myself when it was a matter of justice and fairness and help for people.”
“Being in a male-dominated industry is the worst and the best thing ever, because you’ve got the opportunity to shine. ... You’re like a star in a box of rocks.”
“I don’t want my personal life to be something that I have to mine for content.”
“When no one’s watching, great opportunities show up. We can wait for people to show up, or we can show up ourselves, and I just chose to stop complaining about other people not doing and do something.”
“We have to be careful as a culture that we don’t slip into this kind of anti-intellectualism that is so often girded in what we do.”
“Confession time: The first person that ever made me think I could be in a band was Courtney Love. Sorry, everyone. I saw a whole video on MTV and I saw her playing guitar and I was young and I was like, ‘Oh, women can play guitar? I want to do that.’ And that’s all it took, and that’s why I’m such a big proponent of representation in media.”
“I learned early on in life that you have to be determined and you have to be strong-willed and you have to stand up for yourself. If you’re not speaking for yourself, then other people are speaking for you.”
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