Nellie McKay Quotes

There's a part of me that wishes I could go out in T-shirt and jeans, 'cause I really love Patti Smith, Cat Power, girls who look so casual; that appeals to me 'cause I guess it's the opposite from what I do. But I can never let myself just do that - I always have to try and dress up and create something.

I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me.

You have to build your credentials as a candidate, not just as a woman. You also have to be willing to exercise power. We've been educated to be mothers, peacemakers, but we must learn that we can't please everybody.

I don't really want to just play the girlfriend or the love interest. I get so many scripts like that, and - not to moan, because I'm really fortunate - but I just look at those scripts, and my heart sinks a little bit because I think there's so much more to us than that.

Cleopatra was on a political mission to save her country and her power, but what we remember about her are these two famed seductions, which are a matter of politics, not a matter of love.

We live the life, but in an honest way. Without compromise, without corruption. This I understand now is the big key to my power - the power of Dolce & Gabbana. It's not just the clothes. It's love for the people.

I love drag queens... they perform me better than I ever could myself.

The one thing women love more than money is power.

Politics are always involved, even in my love songs.

In life, single women are the most vulnerable adults. In movies, they are given imaginary power.

In France a woman will not go to sleep until she has talked over affairs of state with her lover or her husband.

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control, with more cooperative ways of interacting which respect differences of opinion and gender.

If women dabble in rap but they're not rappers, to get from dabbling to doing it is really difficult, confidence-wise.

I think girls especially get so caught up in thinking like, 'Oh I have to be prim or proper or fun and sunshiny' when, like, you can be literally anything. You can be mannish; you can do whatever, and it's acceptable.

Because of who I am, and how open I am, there's something inherently political about just writing love songs.

Politics remind me a lot of 'RuPaul's Drag Race.' It's real but it isn't.

I can't not have something attached to like what actually happens in real life. Like I can't do a romantic comedy without there being something where like, in the case of Annie Hathaway's character, her character ends up having Parkinson's, you know? To me, I feel like that's love, you know? Like to me. So every movie has to have that kind of sense of that.

Man may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it.

Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance...A useful gift all love's practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love.

Love as a power can go anywhere. It isn't sentimental. It doesn't have to be pretty, yet it doesn't deny pain.

I go out in the streets, and I go to shows, and I see my fans turn from "I like your last rap" to "I feel your movement; you're keeping it all the way real." One thing I've always said is that's never been my story, and I'm not going to go back on my word.

In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.

Having expressed the rage against the laws and conditions that oppressed them - maybe even excess anger in the beginning was directed at men they came in contact with, because it had been pent up too long - women now come from a new position of easier, more comfortable self-affirmation and empowerment. Women are given to tolerance and are more able to love. I hope it happens also to men.

One of the great things about rap music... it leaves a lot to be desired, as far as I'm concerned, musically, but I do recognize the very important place that it has in music and in creating role models for younger kids to emulate, giving them the dream that they can make it out of whatever situation they're in.