“I’ve been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.”

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.

Everything is so chaotic and messy in the world, and I have always felt kind of dirty.

I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

Writing doesn’t come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency

This party wants to end multiculturalism and discriminate against anyone different.

Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.

I tell patients that tranquilizers alone never cure anyone.

The man who has not suffered – what does he know anyway?

People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It’s their security..

I fawn over these people. I have given them my heart and my soul. The trouble is, I’m unable to love anyone tangible

How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don’t really want to be free?