Mitski: "I was one of those girls people called 'intense.'"

Mitski: "Oftentimes, the most important decisions I make are the ones I don't put much thought into."

Mitski: "I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions - it's overwhelming, because things don't fade for me."

Mitski: "When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to... I finally feel like myself."

Mitski: "I've been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time."

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

Mitski: "Everything is so chaotic and messy in the world, and I have always felt kind of dirty."

Mitski: "When you love someone and care about them, you want what's best for them, and it's always the hardest thing to realize maybe you aren't what's best for them, how hard you try."

Mitski: "I'm so introverted I'm willing to be a workaholic extrovert for another 15 years just so by 2030 I'll have enough respect to be left the f*ck alone."

Mitski: "I'm so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head."

Mitski: "I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions."

Mitski: "It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely."

Mitski: "I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art."

Mitski: "Sometimes when I perform, and it's obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it."

Mitski: "I don't want to be a musician's musician. I want to be an everyone's musician."

Mitski: "I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record... that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record."

Mitski: "Honestly, in the music business, it's all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the 'It' person, and I've tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, 'No, I'm an emotional loser. I can't pretend to not care.'"

Mitski: "I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed."

Mitski: "I couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do."

Mitski: "On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist."

Mitski: "Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they're still musicians, and they're still making art."

Mitski: "I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously."

Mitski: "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."

Mitski: "I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to."

Mitski: "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."

Mitski: "Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things."

Mitski: "I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant."

Mitski: "I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music."

Mitski: "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."

Mitski: "When I started making music, I was like, 'This is something I can believe I was meant to do.'"

Mitski: "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."

Mitski: "It's nice to know there's a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I'm not the center of the world - in a good way."

Mitski: "I think my real influences are out of my control, which are the things that entered my brain when I was a kid growing up."

Mitski: "I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn't last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn't have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house."

Mitski: "A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn't like that for me. I didn't think of it as a job or a career - it was just something that was constant."

Mitski: "I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities."

Mitski: "I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in 'Teardrops On My Guitar,' and she was like, 'Isn't this song great?' And everyone was like, 'Who's Taylor Swift?' And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment."

Mitski: "Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere."

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

Mitski: "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."

Mitski: "I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art."

Mitski: "Often I've had problems automatically bending to a lover's will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, 'This is what I love!'"

Mitski: "I think people don't realize how little of being an artist is making art."