Grimes Quotes

I'm an introvert at heart... And show business - even though I've loved it so much - has always been hard for me.

In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it.

With the first album, I wanted to do so many different things, and I was fighting with myself to try and see if I was worthy enough to do it.

I was like, 'Josh Tillman, you are not a songwriter. You are an ape. Stop thinking of yourself as a songwriter.'

I'd be on stage in Ireland performing for thousands of people and just not believing in what I'm doing at all. And it hurt, it hurt badly. I knew every day that I couldn't continue this way.

Growing up, I naturally embraced who I was, but I was always battling with myself. So I spent half my time being proud of being a woman and the other half completely hating it.

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.

Come on now! How could you be me and want to be someone else?

I've withdrawn many times. Part of me is a monk, and part a performing flea! The fear in the music business is that you don't exist if you're not at Xenon with Andy Warhol.

I feel shabby - because I've made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.

In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.

On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

I have a problem with being a hero, but that's another problem.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's ahrdly enough of me left to make one respectable person!

I'm a really restless person; I'm tired of the way I sounded or looked yesterday. So it's hard to hang onto this image of me as this young Swedish female in this world.

I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.

I feel like writing songs is cheating on acting. It's weird.

I don't think I realized what was going to be the hardest part of becaming an artist until I dove off the diving board ... first I had to overcome a pre-speculated idea of me. I had to sort of burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle, and then now sing in front of everybody, and then that was the second one, and I'm the offspring of - you know, who I'm the offspring of - I had a few hurdles to get through, no doubt about it. But the scales never tipped in the other direction too much.

I grieve and dare not show my discontent, I love and yet am forced to seem to hate, I do, yet dare not say I ever meant, I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate. I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned, Since from myself another self I turned. My care is like my shadow in the sun, Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it, Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.