M.I.A.: "Everything I think seems to be controversial, so I feel like I need to just go away for a second and put it all down on paper until the storm passes."

M.I.A.: "Predominantly in the West, if you can only have creative voices that are either black or white, I'm going to say whatever the f*ck I want, because no one's going before you, and if no one's coming after you, I'm just going to be the freakiest of all freaks!"

M.I.A.: "I'm still working out my opinions - it's always a question mark. I leave loads of space open, and people don't like that."

M.I.A.: "If you're talking about coexisting and tolerance then you have to live by example, and you can't have shiny people all the time everywhere, which is what breeds that sort of thinking - 'this is better than this, that is better than that.'"

M.I.A.: "When mayors get together they probably have better conversations and have better notes to share about running different cities, and just do what suits. Basically, like when you combine all the religions and take the best bits, you should be able to combine all the cities and take the best bits, the information, the tried and tested things."

[On being compared to Lady Gaga]

M.I.A.: "People say we're similar with Lady Gaga, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music's reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She's not progressive, but she's a good mimic."

M.I.A.: "The music industry is so tied up politically. They're afraid they might let other voices in."

M.I.A.: "Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples."

M.I.A.: "My statements aren't incomplete, they're just in-progress. It's a debate and a discussion."

M.I.A.: "Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place."

M.I.A.: "Somebody told me that if you wake up every day and do stuff that's easy, then you're doing the wrong thing. If you wake up every day and do stuff that's really hard and you manage to get through to people, then you're doing the right thing. They might have just fooled me by telling me that, but it worked. I think that's my philosophy."

M.I.A.: "I feel like I'm living in the dead weeds of hip-hop. I live in the graveyard of what went wrong with hip-hop."

M.I.A.: "I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept."

M.I.A.: "There's a bit of hope that a song can be about anything. If you want to write a song about anything, you can, and you don't have to put it through the process of having it be trendy or cool or generic pop or these types."

M.I.A.: "The mentality has taken over because of the way we've promoted things. It's been accepted, to live with fear, and to fear that it's going to be terrible, prepare for the worst. The meat and potato of our existence right now is influenced by what happened after 9/11 - we put our thinking into protecting borders."

M.I.A.: "Everyone has that moment where they just rebel."

M.I.A.: "When I first came out, I was a film student and my mom sewed clothes. I was already doing a million things then, whatever it took to survive. If I had to braid someone's hair to get one pound for my lunch money, that's what I did. But I did it in the most creative way possible."

M.I.A.: "If right now, culture's so divisive, it just leaves these millions of people like me out."

M.I.A.: "I come from a generation where you put the art out and had the luxury to sit back and watch the world deconstruct it, and that was valued. Unfortunately now the work lives in a weird context."

M.I.A.: "I get called 'ISIS' now. Why don't we have a name-and-shame weapons dealership website? Instead, we're like, 'Oh my God, are you really talking about the refugees again, making yourself into a caricature?' And it's like, 'Until you stop the person in your country who's making billions of dollars from selling weapons, yeah, I have to talk about refugees.' Whatever I say will get twisted or messed with."

M.I.A.: "Instead of going to war, we should put the money into arts and culture and let creative people define what Britain is."

M.I.A.: "I don't have a community like a black community to belong to [with] a musical platform that's been built for years and years and years, or the film-making culture, and I don't have the white one to belong to."

M.I.A.: "With homogenized culture, even if you feel frustrated, you'd have to write a Taylor Swift song to get heard."

M.I.A.: "I hate the idea of street art. With music, I just needed my brain and my voice, which didn't cost anything."

M.I.A.: "I felt pissed off because I realized that you have to teach people in a clichéd way how to be happy-and happiness has become too one thing in American media. Achieving happiness is not really about having a flat stomach and the best car."

M.I.A.: "Whoever's inside is inside; whoever's out is out."

M.I.A.: "Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch."

M.I.A.: "Sometimes I repeat my story again and again because it's interesting to see how many times it gets edited, and how much the right to tell your story doesn't exist. People reckon that I need a political degree in order to go, 'My school got bombed and I remember it cos I was 10-years-old'. I think if there is an issue of people who, having had first hand experiences, are not being able to recount that – because there is laws or government restrictions or censorship or the removal of an individual story in a political situation – then that's what I'll keep saying and sticking up for, cos I think that's the most dangerous thing. I think removing individual voices and not letting people just go 'This happened to me' is really dangerous. That's what was happening ... nobody handed them the microphone to say 'This is happening and I don't like it.'"