Quotes from Halsey

The cool thing about my show and me is that I'm a writer, and I'm a writer first if I don't have music.

I cultivated this fan base that I really didn't really understand or appreciate until I put my first headlining tour up for sale. 500- to 1,000-capacity rooms weren't an underplay for me at the time. I'd never done a tour before!

In a city, there's more room to be, where in a small town, you have to squish yourself down a little bit. And it's exciting for me to be pursuing a career where I don't have to be small.

The hardest thing about writing my second album is that I had 20 years to write my first album.

It usually takes me 20 to 90 minutes to write a song because once I start, I don't stop. If I start writing a song, and you try to have a conversation with me, you're a bad person.

I didn't even realize I was writing songs - I thought I was just being witty and sarcastic.

I like writing about places, about people and environments. When I create a world, it lets me go in and define the details of that world.

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.

In one week, I went from being a girl who owed a guy thousands of dollars - my manager Anthony was paying for my outfits, paying for my food; I was sleeping in his parents' basement - to taking meetings with every major label in America. The next morning, I had a record deal and wrote him a cheque to pay back all that money.

It's really exciting to see all those people that exist in numbers online translate into tickets and then into faces, handshakes, pictures, stories.

Even if you can't relate to what I'm singing, I hope you can believe in it and see it as something that it is real.

I was always running off to the city, whether it was Philly or New York, going somewhere where there was something more for me.

I'm a fixer, unfortunately. I'm like, 'Oh, I can fix you.' But it's not just guys I'm dating anymore. It's this entire legion of young girls who tell me they need me to maintain any sort of sanity or peace.

I want to be treated like a musician.

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.

I was doing some YouTube covers, and I had a decently popular blog on Tumblr.

Every time I got to play a show, even if it's already sold out, I'm so scared no one's going to come.

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.

The 'Room 93' EP was just kind of picking apart the sense of voyeurism and the sense of isolation and turning it into, essentially, a little black book and reflecting on - at that time - 19 years of me forming relationships with people.

You numb yourself so you're not terrified when you're on TV at 7 o'clock in the morning with Justin Bieber, who you just met a couple of days before, having to perform in front of millions of people.

I hate feeling like a prisoner. I show up somewhere, and I can't explore the city because there's, like, 6,000 to 10,000 people on the lookout for me.

I would love to write a screenplay for 'Badlands' one day. I don't think I could ever have the patience to do it; I don't even have the patience to write songs. I write some of the shortest songs ever because I don't have the patience.

As a songwriter, pop music really is a love and a joy and a science, and 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.

Every song I write is autobiographical and is about people, and that's one of the things that gets complicated. You have to decide where's your place as a songwriter.