Grimes: "I feel ready to totally blow all of my sh*t up and make something new. I’m in a place of extreme displacement. You know when you just feel like you have a lot to lose? With my last album, I kept getting in trouble for saying stupid sh*t in the press or tweeting dumb sh*t. I just run my mouth like a f*cking asshole and there’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t think before I speak. I try to, but I don’t think in words. I just think in weird pictures."

Grimes: "Mysticism is an evolutionary byproduct. I think we’re inherently religious, even if we’re not explicitly religious. We get emotional about things that feel religious. Even the way people feel about you, it’s a form of idol worship. I don’t know what else you would call it. If there’s an artist I love, I see them live and I cry, and I’m like, 'Man, I’m acting like some 14th-century farmer right now.' I feel like some pilgrim seeing a holy relic or something."

Grimes: “I want to make Grimes a high-fashion sci-fi act.”

Grimes: "Religion is like the best science fiction. I know a lot of people who are atheist or agnostic, and they just hate religion and can’t see anything good in it. Even if you don’t believe in god or anything, this is incredible art. It’s incredible storytelling, incredible character design, incredible visual art. I know we both love reverb. Imagine going into a church in medieval Europe, and you had only ever heard music as someone playing a lute. You enter a cathedral for the first time, and you hear someone singing through a super long reverb. What a mystical experience that would be."

Grimes: "Earlier this year, for the first time, I had a nice studio. It was this spacious room with windows and soundproofing and it had a view of everything. I was like, 'This is going to be great.' And it was terrible. I made nothing. I eventually moved back into the closet, literally. I need to be surrounded by garbage in a closet or I can’t make anything. I need a terrible environment and a bad chair that hurts my back. How do you feel about your workspace?"

Grimes: "I actually think there was an earthquake yesterday. But earthquakes are fun. All natural disasters are fun in the abstract."

Grimes: "I’m really obsessed with polytheism. I love how the ancient Greeks or the ancient Egyptians lived in this weird anime world where there were just tons of gods that could be anything. It’s like every form of suffering had a representation. I wonder if it almost has a positive psychological effect. If your kid dies in a war, you can literally go speak to War and be like, “Why did you do this?” Or, “I hope you did this for a reason.” There’s a weird philosophical justification for all pain, and there’s an anthropomorphization of every form of pain. In our current society, we don’t even know how to talk about things. So my album’s about a modern demonology or a modern pantheon where every song is about a different way to suffer or a different way to die. If you think about it, god-making or god-designing just seems so fun. The idea of making the Goddess of Plastic seems so fun to me."

Grimes: “I'm a very unhealthy person, and Montreal is very cold, and I'm usually sick when I'm there.”

Grimes: "I so need to be in love to make good art. The best is being heartbroken, or in a volatile relationship. My worst creative periods have been when I’ve just been in a stable relationship. In my current relationship, we’re both super alpha, crazy people. It’s just level ten all the time, which is great, even though it’s very crazy."

Grimes: "I’ve recently fallen into a place of extreme flux, where I feel like I don’t know myself at all, but it’s also the most self-assured I’ve ever been. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that."

Grimes: "I always wanted to be really experimental."

Grimes: “I like performing, but I usually get really sick when I'm on tour, and it's just hard.”

Grimes: "I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa."

Grimes: "I was reading yesterday about outrage culture, and for just about every emotionally loaded word that’s in a tweet, the tweet gets 15 percent more interaction. We live in this weird time where we didn’t evolve to engage with this many people, and we didn’t evolve to be observed as much as we’re being observed, or to observe other people as much as we’re observing them. No one is considering the psychological impact of all this crazy technology. Especially since Trump was elected, this is the first time that the general public is fully on the internet. Grandma is on the internet."

Grimes: "Removing all stimulation around you is a really positive thing in terms of stimulating your creativity."

Grimes: “I'm just very obsessed with Japanese stuff in general.”

Grimes: "I can have a pretty extensive moral, ethical disagreement with somebody, and it still makes more sense to get along than to not get along. If you ever go read old census documents before the printing press from France or Russia, nobody had the same name. Just crazy-ass names all over the place. And then after the printing press, everyone started having the same 20 or 30 names. We entered this monoculture zone where everything got more centered into single sources of power. Everyone was in agreement on who the biggest stars in the world were. Everybody knew Michael Jackson and Madonna. But now, with the internet and all of these different forms of media, we’re entering a new period of customization again where people are able to customize their existence more. I feel like the kids of the millennials are just going to have wild names."

Grimes: “If you look at the way people behave at shows, icons are now musicians; they are the people that we worship.”

[In an interview she did with Lana Del Rey]

Grimes: "Knowing our fate, the headline will be that your unborn child is named Ivory Cricket."

[On how she can spot if people are singing what they wrote]

Grimes: "It’s almost like gaydar. I can hear when someone is singing their own words. You hear someone like Rez or Peggy Gou, and for some reason, I just know they make their music."

Grimes: "I’ve hit this point where there’s so much stuff that people think about me that has no basis in reality that I feel like I have to remove myself from my public self. I had to kill my ego, because there was no way to remain invested in myself as having anything to do with the culture while surviving mentally."

Grimes: "I was reading a study of the average age of artists. People are always saying sh*t like, 'Oh, you’re so much less creative as you get older,' like your brain becomes less plastic and more static, which I actually disagree with."

Grimes: "The way that you present yourself visually totally dictates your audience and everything that anyone thinks about you."

Grimes: "On my last record, I was in this gender-neutral mindset. I was an asexual person. F*ck my sexuality. F*ck femininity. F*ck being a girl. I was having this weird reaction to society where I just hated my femaleness. It was like, to be a producer, I felt like I had to be a man."

Grimes: "What’s interesting is that most novelists peak in their sixties. When I think about many of my favorite books, it’s mostly old-ass people who wrote them. My thought was, 'Oh, I’ll just wait until I’m old and out of musical ideas, and then I’ll sit down and write a novel.' I’ll be so much more physically lazy when I’m old, too, so I’ll probably be way happier to sit down for 12 hours a day."

Grimes: "I love fixing problems with writing. Almost all my good songs are from some nightmare day where I’m just bawling my eyes out, and then I have to sit down and put it into a thing. I make so much music if I’m in a fight with my boyfriend or a friend, and I just want to impress them."

Grimes: "I think my motto in life is just, 'Don’t be bored.' Even if I’m having the worst time, I’m like, 'Wow, this rules.' In some of my worst moments I remember thinking, 'Damn, this is such sick fodder for my eventual book.' Speaking of which, would you ever write a book?"

Grimes: "Basically, I'm really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do."

Grimes: "I don’t know if I really relate to any creative community. I get jealous sometimes of the country music scene or rappers. I love scenes. Like, I love how Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson worked together."

Grimes: "I like creating beauty out of scary things."

Grimes: “Miami is just really fun whenever I go there. It's like this post-apocalyptic Barbie world: everything is pink, and there're palm trees everywhere. But then there are also all these people in crazy sunglasses, warehouses with sick parties where all the girls are covered in spikes and black leather. It's a very weird place.”

Grimes: "It’s interesting to hear you say the word 'alternative,' because one thing that I’ve been loving lately is that it’s had a resurgence since Trump. I’d say the peak of alternative music over the last ten years was when people like Kanye or Beyoncé would do this god-level A&R-ing, with all the smartest, most creative people combined onto one record. As we’re talking about the death of the monoculture, I think more alternative music is starting to exist. I guess by 'alternative,' I just mean, as you were saying, people writing their own stuff."

Grimes: "I believe the human mind is a very fallible thing, but it's the only thing that I can really know, I guess."

Grimes: "You don't just have to be influenced by rock, or goth, anymore. It's okay to say, 'My influences are Tin Pan music from Bali and Rihanna.' There are still so many combinations that haven't been done yet."

Grimes: "I don't even wear shoes with heels because I hate making a noise when I walk and people looking at me."

Grimes: "I feel like my whole identity is about being an artist. I was really sick earlier this year, and I had to spend two weeks in bed. I couldn’t think and I couldn’t make anything. It was crazy how my self-esteem just plummeted. I was a shell of a human."

Grimes: "The thing about music is it's not an obscure pursuit, it's a very natural thing for human beings to do. Once you put in the effort, the learning curve is very fast."

Grimes: "If you focus too much on development of the visual angle, it could be a detriment to what you're doing musically."

Grimes: "As a producer, I'm trying to challenge myself to just make something that is of a professional quality - not necessarily pop music, but maybe in the sense that Nine Inch Nails is professional quality."

Grimes: "My favorite music is never the music that anyone else likes, and other people's favorite songs are always my least favorite."

Grimes: "If I'm a bad mood, I can't go on stage and smile."

Grimes: "I can't censor myself; it's really important for me to say how I feel."

Grimes: "It's kind of like I'm Phil Spector, and I'm forcing a young girl to make pop music and perform exhaustively. Except, instead of it being someone else, that girl is also me."

Grimes: "I need to be able to work for 20 or 30 hours in one go in complete darkness, alone with just the computer glow."

Grimes: "I don't want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living."

Grimes: "I was incredibly unpopular in high school but also extremely notorious."

Grimes: "Music is a religion to me and my friends."

Grimes: "I'm not, like, a natural performer. It's sort of a thing that I've had to learn to do."

Grimes: "I'm sad that it's uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues."

Grimes: "It's really hard to be on stage and packing your gear when people who just saw you play are in the room, because they all just want to talk to you."

Grimes: "I don't own anything designer."

Grimes: "My image seems to be so infantilized, and I don't really know why. It belittles the music."

Grimes: "I just can't perform well unless I'm wearing jeans."

Grimes: "If I went on 'American Idol,' I would definitely be kicked out immediately."

Grimes: "In America there's lot of cool cities, but in Canada there's, like, well, Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax may be cool, but they're so expensive. Montreal is the only city that's affordable but also has buses and culture."

Grimes: "When I first started out, I was making really slow, psychedelic ambient music because it was all I could do."