Anita Baker's Quotes

I don't let people use me. That's why I like a small number of people in my life. The more people in my life, the more complex it becomes, so I just try to keep it at a minimum.

You leave home to seek your fortune and, when you get it, you go home and share it with your family.

Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

We don't do drugs, drink or use profanity. Instead we instill morals and values in my boys by raising them with a love of God and a love and respect for themselves and all people. I believe they will have a chance.

I would say that my peak was making my first million at the ripe age of 29, after the first album.

Applause felt like approval, and it became a drug that soothed the pain, but only temporarily.

I'm picking and choosing in terms of the stress factor. If it's not fun, I'm not going to do it.

Long tresses down to the floor can be beautiful, if you have that, but learn to love what you have.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

I don't enjoy hearing the sound of my voice. The most important things for me are impossible to articulate extemporaneously.

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear.

If anything, I was the opposite of most college students who think they can do anything.

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

I feel like there's an obsession with pace right now in theater, with things being very fast and very witty and very loud, and I think we're all so freaked out about theater keeping audiences interested because everybody's so freaked out about theater becoming irrelevant.

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.

I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.