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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On tour, people know that if they ever ask me what I want to eat, I will always say Asian food. I'm becoming a stereotype, but it's what I want to eat. I want to eat rice.

I always have strong urges to sabotage myself. Whenever someone says they like something about my music, I tend to not want to do that anymore. It's not even that I don't like it anymore: it's that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.

I couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do.

The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.