Grimes Quotations

I like creating beauty out of scary things.

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.

If I'm a bad mood, I can't go on stage and smile.

I'm tired of being congratulated for being thin because I can more easily fit into sample sizes from the runway.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Music is a religion to me and my friends.

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

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.

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

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

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

I'm sad that it's uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues.

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

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

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

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

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

I think I have serious latent Catholic guilt issues.

I was incredibly unpopular in high school but also extremely notorious.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I've seen Animal Collective live, and I suffered permanent hearing loss from that show!

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.

I've always been very intense about everything I do.

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

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

I truly love 'Gangnam Style.' I guess it's a meme. I feel like it's one of the few times where the meme and the quality combines nicely.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I approach music- and this sounds crazy- as though I'm Phil Spector, and I'm cranking out these pop stars and forcing them to do all this stuff-except they're all me. But I'm not, like, transgendered.

Especially with music, people want confidence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I just watched another person I care deeply about basically turn into Gollum and my heart is broken.

I love humanity, I love the way people look

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

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.

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 don't own anything designer.

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 always wanted to be really experimental.

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

I listen to a lot of medieval music.

If you focus too much on development of the visual angle, it could be a detriment to what you're doing musically.

I'm just very obsessed with Japanese stuff in general.

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

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

I think a lot of music that's really innovative is not even considered because it was made by people who had a sexual image. And people assume that it's a commodified thing, so it can't be "indie."

I was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.

If painters could be compared to filmmakers, Bosch is the Hype Williams of renaissance painters. With Bosch, there's always a narrative that is very nonlinear - and that's the essence of a good music video.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

I don't have any money to hire actors. I just need to get people who are going to do a good job being themselves.

The groove can go for like three days - once I'm in it it will just keep going until I'm totally exhausted. But that's how I like to work, I like to be away from everyone and just get in the zone, and stay there for as long as I can keep it there.

I write music better in the winter, I prefer making music when it's dark.

I don't know if I would ever have costume changes - usually I just end up taking off my shoes, I get so sweaty, and... I just need to be comfortable.

I grew up going to punk shows, that kind of thing - I don't wanna make pop punk! - but I like the idea of people going totally crazy and it being really intimate, loud and super-aggressive, but combining that with pop music.

Lately I've been really into screaming a lot through delay [effects], having seven people on stage topless going crazy, stuff like that. Really in your face, but maybe more organic than choreographed dance moves.

The last thing I think about when I'm making music is its reception.

When I'm making something I need it to be catchy - I need it to hit the sweet spot.

I love pop music, but I also love noise music, IDM - anything really, I get something out of most kinds of music. I just need to enjoy the process.

I think you can hear, when you listen to someone's music, whether or not they're enjoying making it - it's so great to hear music where you can tell the person making it was just having a blast. That's really important to me as far as my process goes. That's probably why my music ends up being so poppy!

It takes me probably about four hours to get into the groove [with making music]. And it's really important for me to not break the groove.

I only work at night, generally. Usually when I work [during the day] I'll black out the windows or something.

One thing with Montreal is it's so cold and everyone's so poor and beer's so cheap: if you go to a show you have to brave the weather to get there. So you show up and everyone's soaking wet - there's a sense of 'I trekked through three feet of snow to get here!' I think there's a kind of camaraderie that arises out of that, that's important to me as well.

There aren't many other labels who I can say are that successful, and can give me as much as 4AD gives me, and still have such a great roster.

I know texture is really important, but I think texture and stuff precedes songwriting a lot of the time these days.

I think one of the reasons I'm successful as a musician is that the first like 30 shows I played, I played with no monitors standing in front of guitar amps in a shitty, smoky warehouse where people were screaming and wasted, knocking over my gear. So shows after that seem pretty easy!

I think my music's kind of cold, but I don't know if it's related to the weather. It might be because it's always grey [in Montreal], it's very depressing.

Even though I really admire what Beyonce does, and she's probably got one of the best live shows in the world - honestly! - that's so not my style.

I usually like to get people in because I don't have a band or anything. In cities where I have friends, I try to get them to come out and dance for me.

It's important for people not to feel like doing things that are immature, stuff you have to try out when you're a teenager, is bad, per se. Demonizing it is one of the reasons it becomes such an issue.

I think the internet is kind of redefining what it is to be a teenager. Because there's a lot of media that's aimed at teenagers that other people are getting into. But, conversely, pornography or stuff that's intended for adults is completely readily available to anyone, like teenagers.

When an artist, or whomever, moves from their scene to the bigger pond, it starts getting crazy, because all of a sudden people don't respect you, and you have to start being a lot more aggressive than you would normally be.

I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything.