“When you’re doing something you’re not used to, you kind of realize that you’re still a kid: even though the whole world around you sees you as an adult and you’re expected to act like an adult, you still haven’t actually grown up.”

I’m punk, but I love gold.

I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, ‘I love this place.’

I’m not an innovator.

I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.

I don’t really listen to pop-country, but I like really, really old country that’s closer to folk. Like Johnny Cash, who is considered country.

I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.

On one hand, I think it’s very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it’s not talked about, then we won’t progress.

You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born,

I can’t read in a car, because I’ll get sick. It’s almost instant.

Oftentimes, the most important decisions I make are the ones I don’t put much thought into.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.

I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.

I think what’s hard for me is not that I don’t get downtime to chill, it’s that I don’t get time to make music.

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you’re okay with who you are or where you came from.

I would like, in my life, to always be doing things I’m proud of. I know that probably won’t happen all the time. But I’d prefer to be telling stories.

I visualize myself winning the Olympic Pentathlon, inventing a phone that can be controlled by brain waves, or doing the laundry.

If we only make merit but have not stopped doing bad things, then we will never have a day of completion. It is like an overturned bowl which is left outside in the rain.

Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you.

So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.

We [women] are the majority of the population, majority of the electorate, majority of the workforce… and yet we’re still doing majority of family unpaid or low paid labor.

When one is undone—sprawled across the cold tile of a public bathroom in a pool of one’s own vomit, or shivering in the back of a taxi in a pair of urine-soaked skinny jeans with no money for cab fare and a dead cell phone battery.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it.