Grimes

I'm not trained in music.

I think if you're good at art, you'll be good at most types of art.

Fashion can be a really powerful tool, but it's also a place where you can be totally humiliated and have your power taken from you.

I want to make an a cappella record to release for free.

If you tell someone you're doing something innovative, they'll think you're doing something innovative.

I like to aestheticize every possible thing that can be aestheticized.

Miami is just really fun whenever I go there. It's like this post-apocalyptic Barbie world: everything is pink, and there're palm trees everywhere. But then there are also all these people in crazy sunglasses, warehouses with sick parties where all the girls are covered in spikes and black leather. It's a very weird place.

If you look at the way people behave at shows, icons are now musicians; they are the people that we worship.

Music is a religion to me and my friends.

I need to be able to work for 20 or 30 hours in one go in complete darkness, alone with just the computer glow.

I'm not, like, a natural performer. It's sort of a thing that I've had to learn to do.

I can tell really early on in a painting if I'm going to toss it or not.

The way that you present yourself visually totally dictates your audience and everything that anyone thinks about you.

From an early age, I knew I would be unhappy if I wasn't doing something creative.

There's definitely a solitary aspect to not having a band, and there are times when I wish that I did.

My manager lives on my block; four of the apartments in my apartment complex of seven are people I know. It's a really close-knit community, and almost everyone on these few blocks are artists or graphic designers, because we live right on the cusp of a warehouse district.

I think my sound is post-Internet.

I've always been such a nerd.

I don't own anything designer.

I want to make Grimes a high-fashion sci-fi act.

You don't just have to be influenced by rock, or goth, anymore. It's okay to say, 'My influences are Tin Pan music from Bali and Rihanna.' There are still so many combinations that haven't been done yet.

I'm a very unhealthy person, and Montreal is very cold, and I'm usually sick when I'm there.

I'm not interested in making art unless I'm totally freaked out and worried people are going to hate it.

Most of my music videos were made for under $200.

I get offers to do huge-budget music videos with big production companies all the time, but I have no interest.

By the time I'm 50, there is probably going to be a nuclear holocaust. I should just enjoy myself.

You want people to hate you. If you're just making people happy, you're like Mumford & Sons.

I like performing, but I usually get really sick when I'm on tour, and it's just hard.

You rarely find someone who sings really well and who produces really well; it's a problem, and I just think it's a missing link in the music scene.

Basically, I'm really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do.

I'm not good at being, like, a sexy girl.

I think I have serious latent Catholic guilt issues.

When I first started out, I was making really slow, psychedelic ambient music because it was all I could do.

I just can't perform well unless I'm wearing jeans.

There used to be a lot of industry in Montreal, and now there's not, so it's really easy to get huge, empty spaces where you can practice and make music or make art for very, very cheap.

I don't think I know anyone who has a steady job in Montreal.

The thing is, I really like working. If I sit around too much, I get really bad anxiety.

Success, for me, is a song that can deliver shivers.

I love a lot of very sentimental music, but I shouldn't necessarily be the person who makes it.

Especially with music, people want confidence.

I'm actually not a particularly negative person, but I feel like most things are better when they're not actualized. The motivation that comes from wanting something is so much more driving of people than actually getting it.

I start a lot of songs and throw them out because the energy is not right. It's almost like the file becomes cursed. I have to delete it.

My image seems to be so infantilized, and I don't really know why. It belittles the music.

As a producer, I'm trying to challenge myself to just make something that is of a professional quality - not necessarily pop music, but maybe in the sense that Nine Inch Nails is professional quality.

I always wanted to be really experimental.

It's kind of like I'm Phil Spector, and I'm forcing a young girl to make pop music and perform exhaustively. Except, instead of it being someone else, that girl is also me.

I don't even wear shoes with heels because I hate making a noise when I walk and people looking at me.

I'm a super-introverted person.

I went through my adolescence having this revelatory experience - I can have any music I want, and I can get it immediately. For me and for a lot of people I know, there's this musical eclecticism that happened.

I believe the human mind is a very fallible thing, but it's the only thing that I can really know, I guess.