“I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.”

I’m Japanese, and I’m also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.

Whenever I’ve tried to ingratiate myself to an existing community, I tend to give too much, to become whatever it is they want me to be. It’s something I do automatically – I’ve learnt to immediately adapt.

I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.

I don’t think ‘bleak’ is a bad thing.

Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything.

I created this ‘ideal America.’ Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, ‘Oh, I don’t belong here, either.’

All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.

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

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I’m from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

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.

It’s very tempting, when somebody says they like this about you, to want to do that over and over.

I would love for Rivers Cuomo to listen to my music and see what he thinks.

I think my real influences are out of my control, which are the things that entered my brain when I was a kid growing up.

I think music is supposed to be shared.

Then you start to realise, ‘Oh, I’m bending a lot,’ and they’re just standing there existing, and I’m bending around them. But you can’t blame them: they don’t realise it; that’s just how they already existed. It’s hard.

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

The most important thing parents can do, although it’s not the only thing they should do, is model the behavior they want from their kids.

I am learning on every job I do. There is something new every time.

I always feel better after I post a cover. Even if it’s doing the little 15 second covers.

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don’t do it, and it won’t happen.

My son, I do not say these are foals and those asses, these little monkeys and those great baboons, as you would have me do. As I told you from the first,

If people are noticing the hard work I’m doing, then that’s a wonderful thing.

My mother wanted me to be her wings, to fly as she never quite had the courage to do. I love her for that. I love the fact that she wanted to give birth to her own wings.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.