Quotes from Mitski

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

My father was obsessed with folk music from around the world, and I think the countless artists who performed them are my biggest influences.

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

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.

I don't think 'bleak' is a bad thing.

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

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.

The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.

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.

I've stopped wanting a home, I think, because I've been on tour all my life, basically.

I think what's hard for me is not that I don't get downtime to chill, it's that I don't get time to make music.

Miyazaki movies were what I was raised on. I've watched them since I was very young, and I've been greatly shaped by them.

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.

I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.

I don't think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

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.

With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There's nothing that's set.

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.

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

I think it's very dangerous as an artist to be comfortable.

I always have strong urges to sabotage myself. Whenever someone says they like something about my music, I tend to not want to do that anymore. It's not even that I don't like it anymore: it's that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.

Whenever I've tried to ingratiate myself to an existing community, I tend to give too much, to become whatever it is they want me to be. It's something I do automatically - I've learnt to immediately adapt.

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

You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.