“I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance.”

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.

I’m punk, but I love gold.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

In the closing seconds of every game, I want the ball in my hands for the last shot – not in anybody else’s, not in anybody else’s in the world.

Youth is a malady of which one becomes cured a little every day.

And I don’t want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not…not be able to do what I want with you.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.

The ambition of the present Labour government is that every worker in the country will have a greater than average income.

Suffering is nature’s way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.