“I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,”

I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.

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 think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.

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.

Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they’re still musicians, and they’re still making art.

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.

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

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.

When you’re young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.

I know for a fact that I’m problematic. I shouldn’t be looked to for any kind of guidance.

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

When you love someone and care about them, you want what’s best for them, and it’s always the hardest thing to realize maybe you aren’t what’s best for them, how hard you try.

Music was the one thing that was just mine, and no one could take it from me. I created it, dictated it, and it made me not able to let go of it.

My personality’s very obsessive-compulsive. I tend to fixate a lot.

All the time. I feel like I’m not taken seriously.

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

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

If you start from nothing, it is very difficult to get anywhere.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.

That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.

My parents were so poor when I was a kid, I never went anywhere.

But it doesn’t say anywhere in that passage that the people didn’t still struggle with temptation or that they never fell prey to that sin again whether it was the issue of homosexuality or any of the other things that are listed there.