INDIA ARIE

Joe Sample was one of my heroes. I met him at the Curacao Jazz festival, and I fanned out like he was the Beatles!

What I love about Stevie Wonder is the way he makes people feel. He's one of the best examples of how music can heal.

Nobody looked like me when I was growing up. None of the kids were as big as me, or as serious as me, or listened to the same music.

Songs like 'Peaceful World' and songs that are responsible with their lyrics and talk about love and harmony can take the forefront and do something for real.

I wouldn't be back in my 20s for anything.

I was born in love with music. My mother is a singer. Many of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side are musical. My grandparents sang and played blues piano. It's literally in my blood.

Obviously, I've been heartbroken. We all know what that feels like.

I always have something by Stevie Wonder in my CD player.

When I was growing up, I only saw really brown people on 'The Cosby Show,' and they were rich, and their parents were doctors. It wasn't like my home.

It's not my place to say how Zoe Saldana perceives herself, and I can't say how anybody else perceives her, either. I see her as a black person of Hispanic origin, but I don't even know what that really means, because I don't know anything about race and Hispanic culture.

I don't really consider myself a teacher. I think - like, I have opinions like everyone else, and I just share my opinions.

When someone is themselves through their music, it's soul music. James Taylor is soul music to me 'cause it's just him talking about him. It doesn't have anything to do with black or growing up in the church; it's where it comes from. It's just soul music.

It's OK to wear white in the wintertime. Do what you want.

You deal with what comes to you. If it's something you don't like, you deal with it the best you can. If it's something that you love, you rise to the occasion.

The thing that makes me feel most alive is knowing that there's something that I have to do that I'm afraid of.

The subconscious doesn't distinguish sarcasm and jokes. It just accepts what it hears. That's the power of words.

I love my brownness.

Everybody has a spiritual body. Everybody has a physical body, and so your spiritual body is the stuff that holds all of your emotions like your body holds your organs, your food, your muscles, your water. Your spiritual body holds your emotional state and your mental state.

Everybody has their own path. I got mine.

To spread love, healing, peace, and joy is my mission in life - and so I speak up.

I loved her music and the fact that she was a classically trained pianist and that her voice was so unique, but what made Nina Simone my hero is that I had never seen anyone in the public eye who looked anything like me at all, ever.

Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.

Music lives in my mother - she's played in bands in Detroit and toured and did the whole thing. So I have somebody who's done it all to just talk to. And we write songs together.

I'm kind of like a folk singer mixed with soul, but I feel like if you really are a lover of hip-hop music, make the beat banging as possible and then put the message in so that people get the honey with the medicine.

I do believe in prophecy.