“I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. Can accompany myself cause most songs are, like, four chords.”

I hang out with the right people, my friends that I’ve had since the beginning. We go to the beach, take walks, paint, see our family – just normal things that people who become famous lose sight of.

As far as creation goes, you just really have to not overthink and just create and be confident. If you think it’s tight, then the world is going to think it’s tight.

When you look at me, you can’t really tell what I am, but I’m black, white, Native, Spanish, and a little bit of Filipino.

My pops passed when I was little. I didn’t have a dad around to tell me certain things. I didn’t have my biological mother.

If my eyebrows are cool, if my eyeliner is popping, if I’m moisturized, then I can pretty much wear whatever I want. I think if your hair and your face are together, I think it’s pretty much polished!.

Vocally, I’m always listening to Brandy. As a writer, I’m always listening to India Arie and Drake.

You are anything but conventional, baby, did ya know?

I think, as musicians, our music should be who we are. Sometimes it’s not – it’s someone else’s. All heartfelt music and all honest music, it’s who we are. Of course, our upbringing has everything to do with it.

Focused on fire. Bringing the heat.

I’ve always been a very young person with a very old soul.

Sometimes I make songs about girls, and I say ‘he,’ or I’ll make songs about guys, and I say ‘she,’ or sometimes they’re exactly what they’re about. I feel like it just allows me to get a lot more perspective.

Motherhood, building character one day at a time.

My brain kind of works in steps. I have to go through things and then process them and then write about them. I have to understand them first.

Sex is biological, but gender is mental.

I write most of my songs to beats. I play around on guitar, but not enough to where I can compose my own stuff or play solos. Can accompany myself cause most songs are, like, four chords.

I went from broke and homeless sleeping on couches. I couldn’t even figure out what I was doing in Los Angeles. Now, I’m paying my own bills. I’m about to move my mama in with me at 19. I’m on tour now, and this is all off of one mixtape.

Good writing is rewriting.

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

It’s hard to be someone that people talk about and write about, you know? They don’t know me.

If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.

The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.

When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand the right to be them, I demand the right to think them and I demand the right to tell the truth as I see they are.