“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.”

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

Whenever someone says they like something about my music.

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.

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.

I guess you can say I ‘do the Twist.’ I like playful dance moves that aren’t too serious.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

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

I was able to see what I wanted to do, I could see the opportunity, even when others could not, and I stay committed to doing it and doing it well, no matter what.

I’m a father, a son, and a grandson, and if anyone messed with my wife, mom, or grandmother, and if the law didn’t care about it, what would I do? Would I be defined by that action?

With everything I do, I just try to be myself.

I’m at peace with myself. The main thing is not letting people dictate what I do or what I am.

My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing.

So that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne’er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.

When you got people behind you, you can do whatever.