When someone comes up to me and says, 'Mary, you helped save my marriage', or, 'Mary, you helped me get out of this abusive relationship', I'm in it, really in their lives. And I'm so passionate about my feelings, but also about showing people the way through theirs.

I don't think there's anything they can say about me that I haven't said about myself already. And I would be an absolute total liar, and my fans would not respect me, if I said that my life and my marriage are perfect. But we absolutely love each other; we have fun together - it's great.

I like to do interior design, I love to quilt, I love to see different colors together, and I love to match things up.

I still get nervous about singing. I drink tea with honey and lemon before every concert. And I need to have scented candles in all of my hotel rooms.

Once you climb to another level, you have to figure out how to sustain it.

When I was a kid, I needed to sing because it makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel good, period.

I felt ashamed about everything. Me dropping out of high school, me not, you know, just not being beautiful enough. I just didn't feel like I was smart enough or beautiful enough, you know, for years.

I believe there are certain things that God uses to get us out of a bad situation, and I believe music was one of the things he used for me.

I wish I had an extra day with my mom sometimes. Or another hour in the day with my family, husband and children.

I hated myself for so many reasons, and I thought so many things were my fault that happened to me growing up.

As a child I always wanted to be a singer. The music my mother played in the house moved me - Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Mahalia Jackson. It was truly spiritual. It made you understand what God was. We are all spirits. We get depressed. But music makes you want to live. I know my music has saved my life.

It's not just songs and glamour. It's sweat, blood, broken toes, and mistakes... It's life.

By the time I was a teenager, when I went outside the house, it was about hip-hop all the time. Nothing but hip-hop, block parties.

From being a little girl in the projects, going through all of the mess that I was going through, to ending up at the Inauguration for the first African-American president, I'm speechless right now because I never thought I'd - I never ever - I couldn't even see that far. Even when I ended up in the music business, I couldn't see that.

I suffered from self hatred so much. It's like I didn't want to look like that any more. I didn't to feel like that any more. It had to be another way.

It's challenging to find an identity as a young person if you don't have the sustenance of love, because you're being shipped around.

Just don't let the hype of what people are saying and how much they love you, y'know, just take the compliment and be thankful that people are complimenting you, but don't let it consume you; don't let your circumstances around you and the way people view you make you act a certain way.

I grew up watching MTV, when Journey was huge, when Pat Benatar had 'Love Is a Battlefield,' and my friends and I used to cut school to watch this woman in the video. We loved Pat Benatar.

I can go out raw with nothing, and my fans would still be happy, but I feel that I owe it to them to give them almost like a Broadway musical at this point in my life. I have to give them something more, so I do have to think of different ways to do it.

Everything is scary if you look at it. So you just got to live.

For the first time in my life, I'm proud of myself.

The younger Mary J. Blige, I would call her, she was very unaware, ignorant.

If I'm going to be the best in what I do, I have to study what I'm doing, I have to see what I'm doing. I have to see it, I have to hear it. I'm just starting to appreciate myself - not starting, but appreciating myself in a way where I can look at myself back in a movie or listen to myself as much as I do now.

This music business can suck all the love out of you, all the compassion for people - you can start to think you're better than them. But I want to continue to let people know that I'm no better and no worse, I'm just like you.