Quotes from Arca

With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.

When I met Bjork, I felt like it was a friendship first; it was like an oxygen you get from a person you only can exist with symbiotically. It's one of the most beautiful relationships I've had. She is incredible.

I feel like, a lot of times, you make music, and you don't really understand why until with hindsight.

Hip-hop, at its best, is disruptive.

If you try and kind of focus on hope, but you know what it's like to be in the dark, then hope is more meaningful.

A lot of me figuring out how to love myself more involves finding the things that I'm ashamed of and looking them right in the eye.

I always make a point to make my records different. Let's say I have a record that's influenced by hip-hop in an abstract way; for the next record, I'd try not to do that. They are all connected in a personal way but it's important not to repeat myself, because then I can always learn something about myself through my work.

We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you're most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.

If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.

I have a very healthy dose of scepticism towards what identity is and what personas are, maybe because of my life journey. Identity is something so malleable.

I had an unspoken treaty with myself to never lie in my lyrics, so, for a long time, when I wrote love songs, I would use genderless pronouns, like "dear" and "darling" - like some kind of granny!

Making music is an inward and outward gesture at once. I make it because I'm communing with a side of myself that might help me look people in the eye. But at the same time, I'm reaching out, in a way.

It's grotesque to believe the body we inhabit we want to inhabit 24/7.

I've never written a happy love song.

It's a really deep and layered psychological situation - making music with someone - if they're trying to make something real and personal. It's almost like dating: you allow yourself to be consumed by the other - not in a bad way, but in a way that happens in nature.

I want to be interested in the music I make until I die. That's more important to me than the size of my audience.

Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.

I do love voices so much that I will use them and manipulate them. The presence of a human voice in a piece of music is really exciting, even if it's just someone's breathing.

I do love the idea that something can make you forget that you're listening and just transport you to somewhere else in your head.

When I was younger, I used to say, 'I'm not making music. I am getting catharsis for emotion.' For me, vulnerability is an act of uncovering. It's a revealing: the idea of putting aside your armour and allowing pain to enter.

I think there's a certain poetry to having your body reflect what you feel inside of you. Perhaps you have a feeling that's so pure, or overwhelming inside of you that your body disfigures to it - contortions match your confusion.

Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.

When you're uncomfortable, that's when you learn something new about yourself.

I hoped that being attracted to men might go away, but what I never ever hoped would go away were the feelings of femininity, and of softness and fragility, that could live inside of a boy. They were private, but they were mine.