Grimes's Quotes

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

It's interesting to be a front person who is controlling the majority of the sound.

It's obviously funny to be a meme, so I could be down with it in that regard, but it also belittles one's art.

It's really hard to be on stage and packing your gear when people who just saw you play are in the room, because they all just want to talk to you.

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

Music is a religion to me and my friends.

My dream job would be sitting in a room, cranking out hits for Rihanna.

My favorite music is never the music that anyone else likes, and other people's favorite songs are always my least favorite.

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

My set can get really screamo and aggressive, or it can be ambient and Enya-esque.

Removing all stimulation around you is a really positive thing in terms of stimulating your creativity.

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

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

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

Usually I perform with dancers.

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

When I'm making a song that's very Grimes, it just feels very insular and it feels weird to have someone else do something on it.

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.

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

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 feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.

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'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'm tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance or as if the things I enjoy somehow make me a lesser person.

In America there's lot of cool cities, but in Canada there's, like, well, Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax may be cool, but they're so expensive. Montreal is the only city that's affordable but also has buses and culture.

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.

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.

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.

The thing about music is it's not an obscure pursuit, it's a very natural thing for human beings to do. Once you put in the effort, the learning curve is very fast.

There are a lot of musicians I've met on Twitter where it was like, 'Hey, I like your music' - and then I ended up meeting them and it turned into a friendship.

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.

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

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

The most valuable live thing for me is when people look like they're having a good time.

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

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

Especially with music, people want confidence.

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.

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

I always wanted to be really experimental.

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

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

I can't censor myself; it's really important for me to say how I feel.

I don't own anything designer.

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

I don't want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living.

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

I have a lot of Japanese friends: I grew up in Vancouver, and there's this huge Japanese population over there.

I have an intense desire to constantly make music, and I don't feel that way about anything else.

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

I like creating beauty out of scary things.

I like going crazy. And not just for art - I like extremes in general.

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

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

I listen to a lot of medieval music.

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

I can remember going back a couple of years later and, you know, think about it and I was doing a, kind of a political survey, door to door, and everything and I couldn't find any men in the town. It was very strange, you know.

It took about six years to get the Black Lung stuff. It didn't come just instantly. Sometimes, I see lobby groups, today, upset because they work the whole session and nothing happens.

It's like there was the Union, and then there's the Union Management. In some of the strikes that I covered when I saw the strike starting to break, wasn't necessarily when Management was giving in, more so than when the strikers were at odds with the Union Management.

The business manager was doing fine back in his office while they were out on the line, hungry. And, so they started to see a lot of that and there was, that maybe the leadership had its own cause. More so than the miners, you know, it was like a power struggle.

We had had several mine disasters where workers, some of the workers were rescued. It was, you know, who was lucky and who weren't. Some would find the air pockets But, in this one, bam, it was just, everybody was gone and it greatly depressed the state.

You know, when something like, even like a coal mine disaster, or something like this, you think that well everybody's going to make a run to be able to get out, but it happened to fast that they were just all dead.