If you don't like me, life goes on, you know what I mean? But I hope you do like me. Because I think that in addition to being pushy, I'm nice.

I really believe, when you come out of hiding, in whatever way you're hiding, you get to go out into the sunlight.

My mother would organize huge parties for my elementary school classmates. To prepare, she would go back to the bakery in her old neighborhood of Inwood and get special shamrock cookies. Hawaiian Punch was served and we had shamrock napkins. It was a lot of fun.

There's not a lot of conversation going on in my world about softening my image. I'm pretty much who I am.

There will be a moment in life, whether you're forceful or not, where someone will label you something that is negative.

The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.