“I couldn’t wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that’s what I wanted to do.”

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.

It’s hardly ever done, compared to how often it’s done in other companies, not just Britain. Someone from the Roundabout Theater Company – I said, “You never do Shakespeare.” And he said, “Yes, we’re not very good at it.” And I thought, “What a terrible thing to say.”.

Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.

The sound is just sound, why should you go and grab it? You see that actually it was you who went out and disturbed the sound.

I liked comedy, but didn’t know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney.

I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

I actually wanted to be an attorney. I did do things on the side like improv and sketch comedy, but law was my focus. I was a very bookish, academic kid. When I got out of college,

That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

I don’t actually think “true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn’t true it can’t be love.