“I don’t enjoy being interviewed. I feel like it exhausts a lot of my energy. I feel empty after.”

I was born in St. Louis, but I’m from Maplewood, New Jersey. Maplewood is completely different than the rest of New Jersey. It’s very small. It’s quietly affluent but more low-key. Lauryn Hill is from my town, though.

Music is my form of cleansing and introspection, so I have to grow in order to accomplish it. SZA

Every day I pray to see myself the way God and others see me.

Your energy told me what your mouth couldn’t.

I just make music however I feel and pray that it connects, and if it does, I’m super thankful. I think genres are more for other people, not for yourself.

Pain plus love and time = power.

I don’t have a background in music, and I have a short attention span. If you put me in the studio every day, I’m gonna get lost.

People grapple with labeling me as hip-hop, R&B, or pop, and it’s interesting to me. I’m just making music.

Don’t get discouraged with your skin when it doesn’t do what you want it to do, Give it some time. That’s the only way to get to know yourself.

I think music is honest and will make you do honest things.

I’m very into details, so I watch movies just for the details.

I don’t think I’m inherently feminist. I think the universe wants me to be a feminist, and I think I resonate with that. I think it just chose me to be this female energy, thing. And I’m very drawn to female energy, but I don’t really have any prerequisites in feminism. I just roll with it.

When your parents regulate everything you hear and everything you intake, it forces you to get creative in other ways. It sparked the writing bug and the very overactive imagination. Because I’ve had a lot of time by myself and a lot of time isolated from regular culture, I created my own.

Every day I grapple between ‘I’m going to get married’ and ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life alone with a poodle.’

I went through this phase of Spandex, high heels, and fur coats when I was in my late teens and early twenties; before then, I lived in overalls and baggy T-shirts.

No one sets an impossible beauty standard like ya own mama lmao.

Energy is eternal delight.

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

I advise everybody not to save: spend your money. Most people save all their lives and leave it to somebody else. Money is to be enjoyed.

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches

Every time we sit at a table at night or in the morning to enjoy the fruits and grain and vegetables from our good earth, remember that they come from the work of men and women and children who have been exploited for generations.

I think the best evenings are when we have messages, things that make us think, but we can also laugh and enjoy each other’s company.

I want to make sure that everything that I’m creating, I’m creating it so other people get enjoyment out of it. And that’s the reward that you get for that.

I appreciate subtlety. I have never enjoyed a kiss in front of the camera. There’s nothing to it except not getting your lipstick smeared.