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The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

This career essentially chased me down while I was on the spoken-word scene in New York. I kept hearing that my delivery of my poetry - which was very personal and cathartic at the time- was very moving to folks. People thought that I was an actress because of my delivery, when I was just dropping into the work and really pouring out my soul.

The thing running through me is the same thing that writes songs. It's the fighter about to get into the ring. It's like, I'm not here to entertain you; I'm here to get this out, whatever it is.

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

I don't like to be entertaining. I don't like the feeling of being entertaining. If there was a musical or a comedy that was not just for entertainment but was rooted in something I could relate to on a real level, then I think I would do it.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think.

Acting and making art is just something I love to do, and I love to tell stories that feel important, honest and necessary.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

I personally wouldn't want my second album to sound like my first; it might sound very rocky or hard rock - and that wouldn't be melancholy. So if people think my music is melancholic, then so be it. It's meant to be uplifting, and I'm just basically saying what needs to be said.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting.

The poet is like the wise fool or like a version of the stand-up, because we're standing, we're doing stand-up. That's exactly what we're doing.

Poetry has never been a favorite American pastime.

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

In stand up every joke is thought about so meticulously, and one word can completely change how the audience responds. You're up there with no safety net; you can't shirk responsibility. It's your thoughts; it's your voice. You can't blame it on the writing, you can't blame it on the editor. You are just up there completely naked.

I think "artistic" simply means there's more of the creator in the thing. Whether it's painting or song or movie or game, the creator puts more of themselves into the piece, so when the audience see it, they feel something real, they feel something human, they feel something that's like a person.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

For me acting is pretending. It's illuminating my human struggle - trying to grow and have the courage to be filmed while figuring things out.

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.