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

I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.

I think what’s hard for me is not that I don’t get downtime to chill, it’s that I don’t get time to make music.

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you’re okay with who you are or where you came from.

When someone is a musician – trying to make a living off being a public figure – it’s really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn’t have a personal life.

Often I’ve had problems automatically bending to a lover’s will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, ‘This is what I love!’

I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.

I don’t care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

I think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.

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.

Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they’re still musicians, and they’re still making art.

I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,

I’d always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there’s a sense that you’re never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.

The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.

With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There’s nothing that’s set.

When you’re young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.

Every nation on the Earth that embraces market economics and the free enterprise system is pulling millions of its people out of poverty. The free enterprise system creates prosperity, not denies it.

Remember, all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

My strong belief is that God created human beings and therefore he knows about every aspect of the human body. So if I want to fix it, I just need to stay in harmony with Him.

Marriage is a very sacred institution and should not be degraded by allowing every other type of relationship to be made equivalent to it.

You don’t have to solve every problem at once.