Tori Amos

I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.

When you don't have people in your life pushing you, can you push yourself?

My father was a preacher in Maryland and we had crab feasts - with corn on the cob, but no beer, being Methodist - outside on the church lawn.

I definitely would never go back to my 20s. The best is yet to come.

When you hit your 40s, you begin to take notice of the effects of aging because people that you know begin to die of heart attacks and tumors, so we take notice of the effects of aging.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.