Halsey: “Being bisexual, being bipolar, being biracial – it’s been used to define me, but I am desperate to be indefinable.”

Halsey: “Nobody wants to be my friend. They’re scared I’m gonna pop off about something. I’m drama by association. I put myself out there with my peers; I don’t know if people really ever wanted to do the same with me. So I stopped wasting my energy.”

Halsey: “I’ve always been driven to reinvent myself and reinvent my genre.”

Halsey: "I feel like a lot of people look at pop music with a very formulaic perspective in numbers and patterns, but an outsider would think that the process is very natural. It is, but there are a lot of times where people treat it like a sport - there are tricks you can pull, different combinations that make something better. I don't really think I approach it that way, but I definitely have a love for the science that is pop song writing."

Halsey: "It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. I like when it's really organic, so I try to knock it out in one shot."

Halsey: "If I want to hang out with people, they unfortunately need to be working as often as I am."

Halsey: “This is my whole entire life. If I have to go out and live the words that I say – I’m faced with them on a daily basis, whether it’s on stage or through interviews – what kind of life would it be to go out there and lie or censor myself? It would be so exhausting.”

Halsey: "There's a booming, rotating, never sleeping city in the center of my brain and no body can come in and I can't escape. I have a strange sense of pride that my brain works that way, but I'm also terrified of what would happen if I ever tried to think in another way."

Halsey: “I can be delicate and feminine if I want to, but I can also be really f*cking dangerous.”

Halsey: “I think that the weight of… a female artist [is] deciphering time as not your enemy, when you’ve been taught for so long to think that it is. ‘Don’t get too old. Don’t get pregnant because then you can’t go on tour.'”

Halsey: "When I sit down to make an album, it's very methodical. It's like, I collect poetry, and like references, and like movies, and images, and like things, that's like - [a] little grocery bag of artistic ingredients, and then I go into the kitchen, the studio [for] like six to eight weeks, and then I put an album together, and it's the whole conclusive process. And then I switch from album mode into tour mode, and then I go on tour, and I switch out of tour mode into album mode, and they're two very different mentalities: one is creating one is executing."

Halsey: "Anyone who has been with me from the beginning has worked from the trenches with me and they've worked really hard. People that I have brought in where I am now, they haven't worked the way that we have, they haven't lost the sleep, and you know, the blood, sweat, and tears."

Halsey: “At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.”

Halsey: "In moments where I feel powerless, one of the ways that I gain awareness and control over a situation in my life is that I write about it. Once you’ve put someone down on paper, you’ve reduced them to a character, and they no longer have the power that they do in real life."

Halsey: “The environment around you shapes who you are. How you handle an emergency, or how you react when someone is rude to you, that’s you.”

[On her break up with rapper G-Eazy]

Halsey: "I've lived too long in absolutes. A control freak who needs to know the outcome of everything. Only 'forever' and 'never.' I hope I can finally learn how to bow at the hand of 'maybe' and let life take the wheel. That is my wish for myself."

Halsey: "I wake up every day and think about what I am to other people. What I am to the people I employ, who depend on me to wake up and do my job that day and keep this career going? I think about what I am to the kids who listen to my music and all the other people involved in this project."

Halsey: “If I was the perfect form of anything, I’d be boring. If I was a free spirit all the time, I would be boring; I would lack depth. If I was dark and enigmatic all the time, then I would lack relatability.”

Halsey: “If I am who I am, I’m provocative, candid, and androgynous; there’s nothing I can do that will make any fan think, ‘I didn’t expect that from her.’”

Halsey: "It doesn't matter how many private jets you take, how much money you make, how famous you get, keep putting in the hours."

Halsey: “This was the thing where it was like, ‘OK, people want to give you money to make art – what are you going to make?’”

Halsey: "When I’m talking to my friends, we’ll be talking about politics, and I’ll be like, 'Yeah, and for people like us who are lower-middle class,' and they’ll be like, 'Ashley? You’re not lower-middle class.' And I’m like, 'Oh yeah, but I used to be.' So I still wake up every day and feel like I am. I have that survival instinct."

Halsey: "Acting comes really naturally to me because so much of my work up until this point has been studying humans: the way they think, the way they act, and being able to convey a specific type of emotion even when I’m not feeling that emotion."

Halsey: “My records are such cornerstones of my life that I quite literally divide my perception of life based around their eras.”

[On her poetry book]

Halsey: “It’s no different to me than what I used to do on my Tumblr. I used to write poetry and post it on my blog every day.”

[On how she deals with the pandemic]

Halsey: "Routine is the big thing. I need to have structure in my life. I also need to be unafraid of taking care of myself. I think sometimes creatives are like, 'Oh no, if I fix my mental health, I won’t be as creative anymore.' And that’s just simply not true."

[On participating in BLM protests]

Halsey: "Some people [in my position] would be like, 'Oh, I can’t go because I’m famous,' or 'People are going to notice me,' or 'I can’t get hurt.' It’s no different if I get shot or gassed than it is for any other person. My life isn’t more precious than somebody else’s because I sell records. Self-preservation is one thing, but considering your life more precious than somebody else’s is where privilege really starts to become a disease, a poison. There were thousands of people in this country who were far braver than me and did far more than me who didn’t get nearly as much attention. I would do it all again in a heartbeat."

Halsey: "With albums, it’s like I wake up one day and all of a sudden, I know 16 songs I want to write. Then I start them, and it’s done. I’m doing what I do before I make an album—I call it "collecting." I’m watching movies, reading books, and collecting inspiration."

[On making an album and the album's movie at the same time]

Halsey: “It was really cool to make a record in tandem that way because you’re not going back and drawing connections that aren’t there and trying to fill in holes to make stuff work. All of it is so cohesive and coherent the entire time.”

[On her firebrand pushing people away]

Halsey: “It’s hard to figure out when being an activist deflects attention from my art. Sometimes when you’re the centre of ‘having something to say’ you start losing your agency. People don’t wanna hear it.”

Halsey: “After ‘Manic’, I had a handful of radio hits and I think people probably would have expected me to – and I would have expected myself actually – to go in that direction and continue wanting to make music that is performing commercially in that same way,. If I want to sustain myself and give myself longevity, I need to continue to make things that I love and make things that challenge me as a creative. That’s how this album [If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power] came into fruition.”

[On how she came up with the title of her poetry collection, I Would Leave Me If I Could" 

Halsey: "It’s from a really old poem that I wrote when I was 18. The title comes from the idea of feeling trapped with yourself, the idea that most people who are in your life are there because of obligation or convenience, and that everyone will leave eventually. And that reflective moment of, 'Yeah, I get it. I’d probably leave me, too, if I could.'"

Halsey: “So many people are concerned with being the perfect ‘something.’ Whether it’s the perfect singer, the perfect sexy girl, or the perfect feminist. I don’t want to be the perfect anything.”

Halsey: "Being an artist and having a following can be a very scary thing because idolization makes you question your inner role in the universe. A lot of people get caught up in this idea of, 'Wow! This world does revolve around me,' and it most certainly does not. It's the exact opposite; these people don't exist for you, you exist for them."

[On why she chose to release a poetry book]

Halsey: "Honestly, there’s two reasons. The first is because I had it. The second reason is because I reached a point in my career where I don’t want there to be any sort of debate on whether or not I write. A lot of people just generally assume I don’t write my own music, even though I’ve said till I’m blue in the face that I do."

Halsey: "It can be difficult going through a period of time where you feel depressed because it can become your identifier. In the sense that you wake up, you're depressed; you talk to your friends, you're complaining that you're depressed; you talk to your parents, you're unmotivated. You know what you could do to try to overcome it - although obviously there's no cure - but you start to feel like, 'what will happen to me if I feel better? Who am I when I'm happy. I'm so used to feeling like this.'"

Halsey: "As an artist you very much want to have control over your dialogue and your image and when you become exposed in a way where other people are manipulating your brand or the public perception of you that's where it can be frustrating. It's when you want to tell everyone to shut the f*ck up and say 'hear it from me, not from them.' That's all."

Halsey: "I love '80s happy music. I love Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, and the idea of making music that's about people celebrating fun. I spent my late adolescence in New York and I used to go to a lot of gay clubs. The music there was always just about love and connection and celebrating life. I think, for people going through something really hard, to go to a place where you can let loose and listen to music as a distraction, that's about a better place, a better way of life - that's where all the attraction lies."

Halsey: "I think that sometimes people fear continuity because it can turn into repetition - and there's a lot of artists who are really good at creating something new all the time. But for me it's about the consistency in my story. Because after all, I'm the protagonist in everything."

Halsey: "The thing about being an artist is that you evolve so quickly, you grow, you learn, you change, you find yourself hating work that you made months prior. That's the hard part about making an album, but every couple days I fall asleep listening to my album front to back and I lay there feeling so proud of what I did."

Halsey: “I don’t want to be ‘Halsey: America’s Sweetheart,’ or ‘Halsey: Bad Girl.’ If you can sum up my career in a clickbait headline, I’ve done something wrong.”