“I make bad decisions frequently. They’re fun.”

My parents are really conservative. My dad is Muslim, and my mom is the most conservative woman you’ve ever met. They’re very aristocratic in the most quaint suburban way.

When you’re, like, 190 pounds, dark-skinned, and a new artist that no one really cares about, people don’t really take the time to make you look beautiful.

I don’t have any control over what actually happens except that I have full control over my will for myself, my intention, and why I’m there. That’s all that matters.

Kicked myself out the algorithm.

I did some work on Beyonce and Nick Minaj’s ‘Feeling Myself.’

My music is touching people in whatever spaces they need to be touched in.

In the real world, I kind of, like, thrived a little bit. The things that were awkward about me at school, like being hyper passionate, I realized, ‘Oh I’m my own person, and I have my own idiosyncrasies and nuances that I don’t mind.’

In one way, I want to heal people.

I don’t feel ashamed to be loud, which is an argument I’ve had with lots of men, who thought I was too sassy and unladylike.

Just tryna eat pasta and mind my business.

Only break the rules baby or whatever Ja said.

I do a lot of strange things.

Especially when I’m nervous, my mind is running a mile a minute. My ADHD speaks for me before I can speak for me.

Listening to Alabama Shakes made me less self-conscious about my voice.

My mom was an executive at AT&T, a global account lady. I have no idea what she did. I just know she was never home and speaks several languages.

I hate being outside more than I can explain. I really have debilitating anxiety.

My cinema – the ’50s, ’60s – is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

From good to bad, and from bad to worse, From worse unto that is worst of all, And then return to his former fall.

Literature is a splendid mistress, but a bad wife.

I’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.