Mitski

“I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.”

“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.”

“I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.”

“I'm Japanese, and I'm also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.”

“Music was the one thing that was just mine, and no one could take it from me. I created it, dictated it, and it made me not able to let go of it.”

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

“On tour, I don't drink, because I don't think in any other job you are supposed to get to work and drink whisky.”

“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 actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, 'I love this place.'”

“I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.”

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

“My personality's very obsessive-compulsive. I tend to fixate a lot.”

“I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.”

“I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don't know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.”

“I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant.”

“I think it's our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we're able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn's case, we as artists somehow made it 'cool' enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.”

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

“When you are a minority, it's your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work. 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 feel like I've always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.”

“If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.”