“I was one of those girls people called ‘intense.’”

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 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 always have strong urges to sabotage myself.

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.

It tells us the truth about each one of them in order that against the background of human breakdown and failure we may magnify the grace of God and recognize that it is the delight of the Spirit of God to work upon the platform of human impossibilities.

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.

It doesn’t matter what the technology is – no one will watch a Peter Greenaway film anyway.

I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.

Human beings yield in many situations, even important and spiritual and central ones, as long as it prolongs one’s well-being.

One day in Johannesburg, and already the tribe was being rebuilt, the house and soul being restored.

I think it’s like everything else; one shouldn’t dig too deeply.

I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.