Desire, despair, desire. So many monsters.
The world is a heartbreaking place, without any question.
It was very easy for me to dedicate myself to the care of mothers, help them have healthy babies, help them be healthy, help them in a place where they don’t have opportunities. Success breeds the excitement to continue going. It’s harder to get out of bed when you’ve failed.
Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody.
Anita Roddick was amazing. Her presence in a room was full of light, and everything she worked to achieve still resonates now.
To try to help people have babies in a healthy way and to celebrate the process of delivering a child which will be healthy is, I think, almost the best part of healthcare.
As a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.
You wouldn’t find a Joni Mitchell on ‘X Factor;’ that’s not the place. ‘X Factor’ is a specific thing for people that want to go through that process – it’s a factory, you know, and it’s owned and stitched-up by puppet masters.
Churches, depending on their policy, can do fantastic work with people in the community.
I can’t understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven’t really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa – 60 percent of people in – infected with HIV are women.
Nelson Mandela is awe inspiring – a person who really sacrificed for what he believed in. I feel truly humbled by him.
One wouldn’t want to have the same dilemmas at 50 as one had at 15. And indeed I don’t. I have a very different take on life.
I think music is the most phenomenal platform for intellectual thought.
Pop stars are so busy having a career that they don’t really have a lot of time for activism.
Music is a great vehicle for communications, and I have a certain platform. I have an opportunity and I have to take it.
I have a calling in my soul, if you like, to try to make my life in some way worthwhile. What is the value of my existence?
The contrast of the world that we live in and the world that is here in Aspen and the world inhabited by women who have no resources, little or no, very few resources – huge disparity.
I want people to understand me as a person with views, not just performing songs.
I used to be obsessed about how I presented myself. I didn’t want other people dressing me because I didn’t want to be treated like a clothes horse.
I think Scotland could take a stand in a wonderful way, ecologically and morally and ethically.