Everything is so chaotic and messy in the world, and I have always felt kind of dirty.

I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to.

I've been very careful to always make clear that I am a real person. That's why I'm on social media a lot.

Honestly, in the music business, it's all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the 'It' person, and I've tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, 'No, I'm an emotional loser. I can't pretend to not care.'

I don't think 'bleak' is a bad thing.

I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

I would love for Rivers Cuomo to listen to my music and see what he thinks.

I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record... that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

I've been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.

It's very tempting, when somebody says they like this about you, to want to do that over and over.

A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn't like that for me. I didn't think of it as a job or a career - it was just something that was constant.

Tour isn't good for writing, but it's good for inspiration.

When you're an adult, things mellow out. I think when you're a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.

On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

When I started making music, I was like, 'This is something I can believe I was meant to do.'

I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed.

I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don't know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.

I don't want to be a musician's musician. I want to be an everyone's musician.

I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant.

When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to... I finally feel like myself.

I think it's our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we're able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn's case, we as artists somehow made it 'cool' enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.

I think my real influences are out of my control, which are the things that entered my brain when I was a kid growing up.

My father was obsessed with folk music from around the world, and I think the countless artists who performed them are my biggest influences.

I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

What's important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It's very reflective of my ideology.

I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, 'I love this place.'

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music.

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

I really like The Cars. They're just so over the top and super pop, but I don't feel guilty. I'm proud of all the music I listen to.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

Often I've had problems automatically bending to a lover's will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, 'This is what I love!'

With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There's nothing that's set.

There's this myth that women are supposed to compete with each other or something, or we're supposed to hate each other, and that's totally not productive.

When I record, it's this very precious and insular thing.

I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.

On tour, I don't drink, because I don't think in any other job you are supposed to get to work and drink whisky.

Sometimes when I perform, and it's obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn't last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn't have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

It's nice to know there's a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I'm not the center of the world - in a good way.

I'm so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.

I'd always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there's a sense that you're never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.

I think music is supposed to be shared.

I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.

I'm not an innovator.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that's important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.