I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on.
The real tragedy is that we're all human beings, and human beings have a sense of dignity. Any domination by one human over another leads to a loss of some part of his dignity. Is one's dignity that big it can be crumbled away like that?
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
My dreams as a kid were so far below the Grammys, like, maybe selling out a show, or, like, seeing your album on a shelf in an Urban Outfitters... and the Grammys are so far above that. It's very ridiculous.
And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.
We don't compete with the Grammys. The Grammys compete with us. They have taken the stance that anybody who performs on 'The American Music Awards' cannot appear on 'The Grammys.' I don't agree with that philosophy.
I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
I'm kind of iffy on the Latin Grammys because I think we fought so hard, for example, to get the American side of the Grammys to open categories for us... But I support the Latin Grammys in the sense I'm glad that we have them.
Human beings go to church. The guy in the front dressed in black is the guy you defer to. He is in charge of the mysteries of universe, which ordinary human beings don't seem to have the inclination to understand.
We just couldn't seem to get the love from the Nashville awards shows... So Grammys really gave us validation, and so that's why they're such a big deal for us.
Something 'Drag Race' is really good at is portraying us as artists but also human beings. And normal human beings don't know everything. They don't have all the answers.
It's appalling that there have to be movements organized to give human beings the right to be human beings in the eyes of other human beings.
People expect artists to be too normal, I think. I've been around enough of them now to see that they're very extraordinary human beings who behave differently than ordinary human beings. If they weren't as sensitive as they are, they wouldn't be great artists. They are not the same as us. People should just learn to accept that.
"Bhagavad Gita" is an examination of consciousness and the desire of human beings and the quest that we have as human beings to understand ourselves; that it was a map, you might say, for exploring the territory that leads us to find out things about ourselves.
Good marketing speaks to human beings - the way human beings understand and take in information.
I think that as human beings, we quite naturally take for granted what is similar among human beings and, then, pay attention to what differentiates us. That makes perfect sense for us as human beings.
I'm aware that if I make a country album and release it, and it gets on the Grammys, the Grammys are going to put it in the Urban category. Just my blackness automatically sets it in there.