“I always have strong urges to sabotage myself.”

When you are a minority, it’s your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work.

It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.

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 elitist.

I think it’s very dangerous as an artist to be comfortable.

Maybe this is a made-up belief to preserve myself, but I do believe that everyone has a purpose, and my purpose is to put out music that means something.

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

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.

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

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.

Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.

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

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn’t identify as that before I came here.

I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in ‘Teardrops On My Guitar,’ and she was like, ‘Isn’t this song great?’ And everyone was like, ‘Who’s Taylor Swift?’ And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.

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.

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.

Create a haven for the core of your universe but also for the ones that grow in your garden.

Maybe there’s more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.

I have a bunch from when I played on the Canadian Tour. I’m not superstitious.

I haven’t done the things I’ve done to be in a sitcom.

It’s a coup by the GOP to grab the governorship to California to make this place a safe haven for George W. Bush in 2004. It’s incredible when you think about it. The recall cost the state $100 million