Top 181 Owned Quotes

The guy who owned that island was from Oregon and he decided that he wanted to have an Oregon feeling to it, so he planted pine trees all over the place!

I was born in Chicago in 1927, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. We lived in a nice apartment, always had enough to eat, and I had my own room. I never was aware of the Great Depression.

And imagine where we’d be today if President Franklin Roosevelt had owned apartment buildings in Frankfurt and Berlin. You know, some of us might be speaking German.

I don’t want to be owned by a corporation and obliged to make a certain type of album. I want to be free.

The majority of ground in the U.S. is owned by the federal government, and right now, very little of it is accessible to anybody that is trying to produce oil and gas, and we need to be opening that up.

The wealthy have installed their slaves in the highest spheres of the state. The banks are privately owned. They are concerned solely with profits. They have no interest in the common good.

What makes a good deli is a place that, one, is generally family-owned or owned by individuals that care. Delis that are owned by large corporations tend not to have that same soul. And two, delis that make as much of their food from scratch as possible.

My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn’t very expensive, I guess, because they don’t know if it’s a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who’ve owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that’s the earliest.

Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.

My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana, and he remembered riding his horse across the prairie and seeing some large bones sticking out of the ground. He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty good notion that they were dinosaur bones.

I’ve never owned an Apple product. I like the fact that PCs are open architecture and not locked down like Apple products. I feel that Macs are also unjustifiably overpriced.

The hardest achievement in acting – in my opinion, anyway – is nailing a role that absolutely nobody else could have played. Pacino owned Michael Corleone… but DeNiro could have owned it as well. Who else, though, but Val Kilmer could have nailed Jim Morrison? Does anyone besides Will Ferrell pull off Ron Burgundy?

When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it’s not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.

You should get as close to the power when you’re pitching something. I got my two biggest breaks with the man who owned CBS and the guy that owned Paramount, because I was dealing with the guy who would say yes or no.

As long as Rupert Murdoch has owned it, the ‘New York Post’ has been defined by its shamelessness and total lack of interest in taking responsibility for its worst errors and poor judgment.

I owned a ’70 Camaro for many years, which I loved.

The great problem with corporate capitalism is that publicly owned companies have short time horizons. Unlike a privately owned business, the top executives of a publicly owned corporation generally come to their positions late in life. Consequently, they have a few years in which to make their fortune.

The first ever VHS I ever owned, my brother and I, was WrestleMania VII. We watched that thing to bits – I think the tape chewed itself up.

I have never seen a picture of my mother. My mother’s family never owned a photograph of her, which tells you everything you need to know about where I’m from and what the world was like for the people who gave me life.

I had always felt deep down that I owned the characters. Much as I adored and cherished the work of my actors, I felt that they were cast to do and be what I could not physically do or be.

I don’t have a gun, I’ve never owned one and never will.

As a result of the asthma I was sent to school in the country, and only visited Sydney for brief, violently asthmatic sojourns on my way to a house we owned in the Blue Mountains.

I was a psych major in college and I actually owned two white lab rats. I had to train them and I took them home so that’s just kind of missing for me.

I once owned a really, really ugly pair of white leather boots. They were so bad. It was back in the ’80s! It was just a really tacky fashion choice when I was in middle school, and I thought it was cool. I’m really embarrassed.

My brother still lives in the house my parents owned in Fairborn. I go back there a lot to visit friends and keep my connection to the National Museum of the Air Force and my membership with the Dayton Engineers Club.

I wanted to finish my career with one team, in one city, one mayor, one park, one owner. I did that. The Wrigleys owned the team. We played all of our home games at Wrigley Field during the daytime. So my career was very unique, and I am proud of it.

Back then, the excise tax was designed to be a luxury tax for people who owned telephones.

The first cellphone I owned was hardly a slim, high-tech device – it was more like a brick with buttons, only with worse reception. If you wanted to use your phone to give someone a message, you were better off throwing it at him and hoping you broke his car window.

I like the way I look in a suit, and I wish I owned more. Actually, I wish I owned suits that fit me, I should say. You can buy off the rack and think, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ But then you get a tailor-made suit for you, and it’s a whole different animal. You don’t just look good in a suit, you feel good in a suit.

We need to rid our State Owned Enterprises of corruption because the money being siphoned out should be funding them.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

They seem to have forgotten that, and are back saying the only purpose of P2P networks is for illegal trading of owned goods. We claim part of the reason for P2P is for legal trading of what ought to be in public domain. And what is in public domain in many cases.

I wish I owned a bunch of farm land. I’d love to have fields full of grain.

I rolled the second car that I ever owned, a Toyota 4 Runner. This was winter in Colorado, two weeks before the 2002 Olympic trials. I was driving in the outside lane, and my rear tire caught some black ice, and we totally turned sideways to the point where we were heading right toward the median.

I met this homeless man who had never owned a shirt in his life. He had taken his pants and worn them as a shirt and I thought it was so creative. He was liberated from the conventions of fashion.

We gotta get Fannie and Freddie out of government ownership. It makes no sense that these are owned by the government and have been controlled by the government for as long as they have.

I’m lucky that it’s about fashion and perfume and cosmetics. If my father had owned a tire company, I don’t know what I would have done.

My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.

I owned the world that hour as I rode over it. free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them.

I opened my first bar that I owned in 1989. The first one I ever owned was in downtown St. Louis.

A couple months before I got the audition for ‘Arrow,’ my husband and I had just sold everything we owned, packed our dogs and belongings into a truck, and moved to Los Angles with a prayer and almost no money. When I ended up booking the role, we both cried from joy and gratitude for a week straight.

There was a guitar that my uncle owned and never learnt to play. He sold it to my dad, and when I heard ‘Layla’, that was the tune that really grabbed me. I said to my dad, ‘Wait, there’s a guitar, right?’

Roughly 65% of American households owned a video recorder by 1989, when ‘The Simpsons’ was launched. This meant that fans could watch episodes several times and pause a scene when they had spotted something curious.

Growing up in Luton, we’d always eat on a cloth, placed on the floor of the living room, with no TV allowed. There were no chairs back in Bangladesh and Dad wanted to keep the tradition, so we never owned a dining table.

We never had a giant library or owned a lot of commercial characters the way most studios did. And since we didn’t have a lot of internal resources, we had to find ways to be inventive and resourceful, which I think is a healthy way to run a good business.

I felt I was owned by possessions.

There’s a sense of authenticity that comes with ‘Ebony.’ There are very few national media outlets that are majority-African-American owned and really speak to our community with a sense of pride, authority, and ownership. That’s what we do.

I ride horses, I love horses, I’ve owned horses.

Mistakes, once owned, apologized for, and buried, need to be an accepted part of life.

We owned what we learned back there; the experience and the growth are grafted into our lives.

He owned a service station, and I used to go there and piddle around – pump some gas, get in the way.

The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I’d almost forgotten I owned.

I’ve owned more sofas than I’ve had husbands. Both sag in the end, but I generally fall out of love with the furniture quicker than the men.

The first guitar I ever owned was a Kay SG copy. That cost like $35. Man, that was a terrible guitar.

I never owned a suit until after the election. I got married in jeans and boots. My wife and I, when we went to prom, I was in a pair of jeans.

Our house was destroyed in 1943, and I moved the family to a cottage I owned before the war in the Bavarian Alps. This cottage was meant for a very few people, and at the end of the war, there were about 13 people in this very small house.

My parents owned a hair salon, so I learned a few tricks there. I can cut people’s hair – if they let me.

Properties like the Broadmoor diminish greatly in number over time. They flourish best if owned by a family with the values of stewardship, as opposed to seeing them as just another asset.

At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.

Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can’t identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.

I don’t know if I owned a toothbrush until I was 19, maybe. I didn’t come from stock that placed any importance on the toothbrush. But a couple of girls I met changed that. And I would do anything to get a girl to pay attention to me long enough that I could feel good about myself.

I grew up as a fairly poor kid in, you know, Toronto, Canada. I don’t think I owned any new clothes until I was, like, 15 or something. They were all second-hand and forged from paper.

In the old days, people shared music; they didn’t care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.

My thing is to have a good, profitable company, for it to be 100% owned independently.

My father, Beric, ran a joinery business and owned two factories.

No company fails in communist China, because they’re all partly owned by the government.

My first record I owned was by Les Paul.

If you let people own their land, they take care of it. That’s why privately owned land is always taken care of, and the parks look like cesspools. Nobody takes care of what everybody owns.

I know how to finance something. It’s easier today because, as you’re more successful, everybody wants to do deals with you. But even in the beginning, when I took Landry’s public, I owned 100 percent of it. I never had investors or anything. I was just always able to find a way to do it.

Until I was 42, I could fit everything that I owned into two suitcases.

Good Charlotte became more than a band and more than the songs: it became something that the fans owned.

Every restaurant in the world is owned by a Greek.

In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities.

We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot, and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

Jefferson owned slaves. He did not believe that all were created equal. He was a racist.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you’re just mad.

My parents owned a pharmacy in Budapest, which gave us a comfortable living. As I was their only child, they wanted me to become a pharmacist. But my own preference would have been to study philosophy and mathematics.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

When I was in elementary school, I watched ‘Cinema Paradiso’ 22 times and memorized the dialogue. In the movie, everyone had a place, even the bum who thought he owned the piazza. Eccentricities were celebrated, and no one was isolated.

I spent some time in juvenile detention, and as far as owning space, I may have owned too much space as a young boy, and it got me in trouble. But through that, I found some unity. I found acting, and that’s become a place to exercise that.

I think it would be better if nobody owned anything, but they didn’t starve. Had enough paint and enough pianos and everything else.

My dad and my uncles owned a bar outside of Cincinnati. I worked there growing up, mopping floors, waiting tables.

I was really into classifieds for awhile. I’m a big negotiator. My father owned a car dealership when I was younger… it’s just in my blood.

When buying vintage, it’s important to choose pieces that you feel like you’ve already owned for years.

I’ve never owned a pair of jeans, but I had a fantastic denim boiler-suit and it got a lot of wearing.

No one wants a domain with their name on it owned by somebody else.

Disruption is in my genes. My father owned one of the first discount toy stores, Duane’s Toyland, in Albany and Schenectady, near where I grew up. Discount was always a huge disruptor – it disrupted Sears Roebuck.

My father was a chef but hadn’t owned his own business. I didn’t like that. In my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to be in business.

Only once in the last thirty years have I made a duplicate, and that was a watercolor from my oil picture now owned by the Layton Art Gallery, Milwaukee, called ‘Hark! the Lark.’

When the Atlanta Braves were owned by Ted Turner, he was very passionate and did whatever it took to do something good – and eventually he made money. Labels used to be the same way. Now they’re corporations, and it’s only about their stock.

I don’t have a real home. When I got ‘Avatar,’ I sold everything that I owned because I knew it was going to be a long journey. I’ve got two bags, and that was four years ago, and I’ve been working ever since, and I’ve still only got two bags – a bag of books and a bag of clothes. That’s about it.

To be honest, I owned one suit before I filmed ‘Mad Men’ – the one suit that you have to have as an adult. Outside of that, I never really felt comfortable in a suit.

Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day, and 8,000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, ‘Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al.’

I went to a college prep high school in St. Louis, Missouri. When I graduated from school, I owned this thing called the Headmaster’s Cup, and the Headmaster’s Cup is for the student who exemplifies the spirit of the institution and is recognized by the faculty and administration.

I’ve always been salaried; I’ve never owned anything. I’ve done very well, lived very well.

If I owned Marseilles and Hell, I’d rent out Marseilles and live in Hell.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president for his first term in 1980, he received strong support from the so-called Sagebrush Rebels. The Rebels wanted lands owned by the federal government to be transferred to state governments.

I’m a lifelong strong supporter of the Second Amendment, and I’ve owned and used firearms since I was 10 years old.

In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.

The problem is that the automobile companies are not independent entities capable of pursuing their own interests. Rather, they are owned and controlled by organizations that are much more heavily invested in oil.

I’ve owned mopeds in the past.

I’ve never not owned a stick shift. There’s something about manual transmissions that I really appreciate and enjoy. And besides that, I like driving; I enjoy driving.

The first album I owned was probably a Backstreet Boys album, and shortly after was Shania Twain.

I am truly independently owned and operated.

I realised I owned eight pink suits, which I did not need.

Before I started WeWork, I owned a baby clothing company based in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

After writing two books featuring amazing dogs, I decided to be owned by one.

Marriage is not for everyone, but spiritually it is very necessary for me because I have a desire, a need to feel owned.

If your bank took bailout money, take your money out of that bank and put it in a credit union. Credit unions are owned by the people who have their money in the credit union.

Plus, 40% of our debt is owned by foreign interest. I can’t support a plan that passes along cost burden to our children and makes us more reliant on foreign dollars.

My father was placid and easygoing. He owned a small shoe store where I helped out on Saturdays. I think he’d have been pleased if I’d made a career of working in the shoe store. But my mother was ambitious. She encouraged us to read books, and she pushed us toward a musical education.

I remembered their songs but I had never owned a Beatles album.

Acting is a community where you come in and out of each other’s lives. I’m slightly envious of the Golden Age of Hollywood. It must have been frustrating to be owned by the studio, but it was also like being in a company, working with the same people, and that appeals to me.

The majority of the wealth of human knowledge is owned by a few publishing companies that hoard information and make billions off licensing fees, although most scholarly articles and journals are paid for by taxpayers through government grants.

HAG Records, is a company that I’ve owned. I’ve had a couple of gospel releases on it. We developed a pretty good distribution setup there and we do have something to use in case they don’t want to sign us.

The fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves doesn’t devalue what he wrote.

My family owned a gelateria business, so as a kid, I would always design ice cream cones. If you want to transform a shoe from design into a properly wearable product, however, you need technical knowledge. So I worked for four years inside a local shoe company.

Movie studios are owned by giant corporations. They care about money; they don’t care about movies.

My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So, to make money in the summer, we could cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco.

Conservatism’s vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the ’60s – no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants.

At one time in Montana, our elected officials were literally bought and owned by companies.

I’m the football manager of Newcastle, which is owned by Mike Ashley.

America was made for white men. Literally, at the time of the writing of the new country’s Constitution, only white men could own land, and only men who owned land could vote.

I have never solicited nor received money from Iraq for our campaign against war and sanctions. I have never seen a barrel of oil, never owned one, never bought one, never sold one.

In the 1980s, in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from.

There were loads of plays which were very popular before and after the war, where everybody wore a dinner jacket in the third act and it was in a house that you wished you’d owned with people that you wish you knew. It was life seen through a very privileged way.

We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there’s more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.

I’m happy – I moved into my new house, which is the first time I’ve owned a home on my own. It’s a big step, and my brother lives with me – I’m so happy about that.

I owned a couple different businesses.

The hip hop industry is most likely owned by gays. I happen to think there’s a gay mafia in hip hop. Not rappers – the editorial presidents of magazines, the PDs at radio stations, the people who give you awards at award shows.

I’ve owned about 2,000 guitars through the years because I’ve traded a lot and given away and sold some stuff.

No, the Knicks are not owned by the public. The Knicks are owned by the shareholders of the company, of which I’m the majority shareholder.

I don’t think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don’t think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching.

I think there’s a certain level of trust that I have with women. I’ve always been honest, even when I haven’t had good times in my life or my movie bombed or I’ve had great success. I’ve owned up to all of it.

My parents and friends, they’re Ph.D.s that worked as custodians, that owned their own businesses, that went bankrupt, that moved seven times, that sent their kid to Harvard, that don’t have any money for retirement. Highs and lows of life.

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.

Insurance companies, whether private or government owned, must be compelled to pay for health-promoting measures. In turn, this will encourage physicians to offer such treatments in earnest.

I work out at Will Space four times a week. It’s a private training gym. It’s owned by my trainer, Will Torres. I just came from there, actually. I turned Mark Consuelos onto Will, so he goes there too. Today we boxed. It’s every kind of cross-training you can do.

Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; it’s a privately owned space on the Internet.

You can’t put the Hollywood sign in a movie without paying them. That is a landmark in L.A. I’m sorry, remove it from our skyline, then. You know? How dare they. That should be public domain, right? But it’s privately owned, and they enforce that. They sue people. If you see it in the movie, they’ve paid for that.

In ancient British times, the whole country belonged to tribes, and the tribes owned their several districts. At the head of each tribe was the chief.

I grew up in Hollywood in an apartment. Then in Tarzana, California, on a mini ranch where we owned horses and chickens.

When I was born, my father owned a business called a ‘reading circle’; folders containing an assortment of magazines were lent to customers for one week, then recollected and lent out again. The older the folder, the lower was the fee. This was a flourishing branch of industry.

The land on which the cattle grazed was communal property. It was owned by no one. It was nobody’s private farm. It was the common property of the people, shared by the people. So the practice of sharing was central to the concept of ownership of property.

We Liberals like to think our thoughts aren’t controlled. We pride ourselves on our independent thinking. We know we shouldn’t believe everything we read. We realize the media is skewed, we know it’s owned by a small group of people, we realize it’s biased, etc.

I was raised with a sense of entrepreneurship – my father owned a roofing business, and I grew up with the idea that you never want someone telling you what you can and cannot do.

I own a lot of my house, because I’m Irish and from people who never owned anything.

I’ve owned a lot of dogs in my life – Marcela, Rusty, Petey Pup, Precious, Rosy and Ava. Each were in love with life’s simple pleasures, but being people in dog suits, as they seem to be, they each had a defined personality!

Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.

In my early 20s, there was a period when all I owned was about a dozen CDs and a crappy Discman. I’d listen to ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ album endlessly as I sat on off-peak trains jerking around the Sussex countryside to and from the asylum I worked in.

Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin were the biggest inspirations for my work because they trod into areas considered to be owned by male writers and created these worlds that are infused with an understanding of so much more than just technology.

I’m going to put on my gravestone, ‘He never owned a cell phone.’

A cultural thing that is funny to me is that every time I go out in D.C. after a show, all the nightclubs and restaurants are owned by Iranians and Afghans. It’s funny to me how we lost our countries but we gained the nightlife.

When I was a kid, I worked in the circus. It was a touring circus that was owned by a man named Terrell Jacobs. It was just one big tent, and he was a lion tamer. He didn’t have any kids, but the bit was that I would dress up as his son in an identical outfit.

When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.

My mom worked for Apple, and my dad owned his own business.

In our family, we’ve always been owned by border collies, or dogs of one kind or another, and have rescued many dogs. We’ve lived in the woods and sometimes have had as many as 70 sled dogs. Or had six or seven dogs living in the house. Dogs have saved my life on more than one occasion – and I mean that literally.

A man perceives himself as owning and being owned by a woman.

When he ran a private company, one he owned, Trump could command all its constituent parts to do his bidding and make the rules himself. You’d think by his fourth year in the White House, he would have learned that the presidency doesn’t work that way. But obviously he hasn’t.

‘Luncheon of the Boating Party,’ owned by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., has served Americans as a symbol of France and French culture, both of which I love, and is as evocative and triumphant an image as that other emissary of France, the Statue of Liberty.

I’ve been a fan of comics, but I’ve never been, like, a diehard: like, I’ve never really owned a bunch of comics or anything. But I’ve always been drawn to them and read them.

In Trump’s mind, women derive their primary value from how they look, which is probably why he owned a major beauty pageant for so many years.

I’m not one of those kind of people that likes to beat up the past to validate the present. Certain people think that it’s cool to make fun of MC Hammer. I’m like, ‘Yeah, but you owned all of his records.’

My best friend Jerry started a boat-washing business, and it was one of the most critical experiences of my life. I got to meet a lot of people who were entrepreneurs. My parents were schoolteachers, and I was now meeting people who owned companies. I realized that if this guy can do it, why can’t I?

I was the only person at Univision who had complete creative control of my own show, by contract. They didn’t like that. I was the executive producer; I owned the studio where we taped. I decided who went on my show and who didn’t.

St. Louis’ locally owned restaurants are part of the heart and soul of our city. These restaurants have made St. Louis a destination for food lovers from all over the world, while also serving as places where our communities can come together and share a meal.

If you’ve done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We’re absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we’re not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will be owned by the Brunswick Group. It’s quite different.

I don’t know if I’ve owned a piece of technology that I hated – I don’t think I would have owned it then.

My beard is owned by HBO.

The first car the family owned was a Model A.

When I was four years old, my mother owned some tenements in the Bronx.

My dad owned Cadillacs all my life.

When the Bill of Rights was written, no one owned a MAG5100, 100-round magazine for an M-16. The concept of a mass slaughter carried out over a matter of minutes was incomprehensible.

You wouldn’t find a Joni Mitchell on ‘X Factor;’ that’s not the place. ‘X Factor’ is a specific thing for people that want to go through that process – it’s a factory, you know, and it’s owned and stitched-up by puppet masters.

I think the media has portrayed conservatives as these cold, heartless people who want poor people to die and let half the population starve and all this. They’ve done that so effectively because they’ve owned the narrative for so long.

My mom was a teacher and my dad owned a small printing press where we printed visiting cards.

I love music. But I’ve never owned a TV in my adult life, and I’ve never lived in a place with a television.

I would take one of 15 half-million-dollar cars I owned and go to the mall and spend that much money. Stupid, stupid stuff. It’s like it didn’t make a difference. They were ego investments. I would have been great with three or four cars. I didn’t need a 117-foot boat.

When I was 4, I had a schedule. I was playing softball. My brother was playing football. My parents were teachers, and they’d owned businesses. We like to work hard. Work and then books. Books and then work. We just knew that we had to excel. It sounds militant, but trust me, it was fun.

Most artists have contracts directly with the record company, and when they do music, all of their music is owned by the record company. But I did mine through a production company.

I didn’t realize I could sing until I served someone tea at a cafe my parents owned in north west London, where we had settled as a family, after moving from Jamaica when I was 11. I was harmonizing to a track on the jukebox and a man asked me how I managed to do it so well. He recommended me to a talent agent.