“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 could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.

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

I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.

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

I’ve stopped wanting a home, I think, because I’ve been on tour all my life, basically.

Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.

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.

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.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

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

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

Our future lies in being a high skilled, high innovation, free enterprise nation.

Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.