Playing to bigger audiences at festivals got me in the mindset of writing music that I would sing to a crowd.

No one goes to BrooklynVegan to read about content, they just go for drama. It's a tabloid, the scum of indie.

I was really inspired by this feeling of mania, a caricature of myself that I look down upon and see negatively.

Success will come. Or it won't. But I think you can only make a go at it in a big way by fully being yourself and taking risks. People can feel risks.

Don't say yes to everything. Learn how to say no, because people respect a no.

Do not be precious about your music within your own world. Try everything you want to try; just because it exists doesn't mean it's done.

I'm gonna really enjoy bringing out the catsuit once in a while.

The only thing that deeply frustrates me is the slow speed [of major labels]. The more people involved, the slower the pace.

You'd have to be kind of a bonehead not to feel pressure.

It's a lot different being a hip-hop artist. You just show up with a piece of paper with your words on it, say it in the mic, then you leave and some other guy does all the music.

Everyone in our generation lives in a world where you're surrounded by all sorts of music all the time. People's tastes are made of combinations of genres.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

Kiss me again. Let me imagine for a moment that you belong to me. The memory will keep me company in my solitude.

The ability to absorb a book and make someone else's words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.

Every day is my best day...I'm not going to have this moment again.

Witnessing the extreme poverty in remote parts of Affrica can make you feel sad and powerless until you realize how little it takes to change these people's lives fundamentally in sustainable ways.

There is a certain physiognomy in manners.

I make a composition with a white and a black, and make adjustments when the white has become a paper and the black a shadow.

Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Well, I'm still looking for Maurice Ashley. My essential qualities. I think that more than anything, I try to do the right thing, I think about doing the right thing.

Nothing but you can lay hold of my mind, and that can lay hold of nothing but you.