Daya Quotes

To the extent that independent means you're willing to attempt to put your own ideas, personality, and commitment to the material on screen, then of course I hope I'm independent until the day I die.

I just want to make my music, and I want it to stand on its own.

I want to be a genuine artist who has a say in what I do.

Stand up for yourself and fight for your right to be the artist that you want to be. There's plenty of pressure from outside; people tell you how to dress and how to sing or what to sing, but I always felt like if I'm going to fail or succeed, I want to do it on my own terms.

I can only do music if I can do it the way I can do it.

I wanna take what I'm doing and create something around it as opposed to trying to fit into someone else's world.

We only do what we think is good and what we're happy with. I do that in stand-up, I even do it with my children's books. I don't do market research, I don't have focus groups, I don't care. I don't care if it fails, honestly. I'd rather have something that's completely mine fail than something succeed that I'm not proud of.

You work so hard at something to make sure that it's very pure and very genuine and very steadfast to who you are, so creative control for me is a big one. Thankfully, I've been able to retain 98% of it which I never really expected, so I'm very grateful to be able to control what I can.

I'm certainly not who people think I am. I always do whatever I want to do, and my films are personal to me.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

I don't like people telling me what to do, or trying to MAKE me write songs.

I've never been one to sit back and go, 'I'd better do what the audience wants me to do, because I don't want to lose them.'

I just don't like to do a lot of the normal things expected of other artists. I'm not trying to be difficult; I'm just trying to stick with what it is I want to do.

My films, no one else will do.

If you consider the definition of authenticity, it's saying something and actually doing it. I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic.

I've had a lot of voices tell me what I should be making. Personally, I would much rather live and die by my own hand. If my stuff sucks, then at least I made it suck. I didn't allow some person, some old dude in a suit, to make it suck for me.

I don't want people to just hand me music and be like, 'Here, you sound good on this. Sing it.' I want to be able to say, 'This is me.'

I established early what I was and wasn't willing to accept. People tried to say what I had to do, whether it be pop or R&B, to be successful. Even when I was in the girl group, they would try to make our voices sound very radio-friendly and fit that mold. But even before I got signed, I knew who I was and who I wanted to be.

There's no way I'm going to write for other people.

Anything you spend a long time on, of course it would be nice if everyone likes it. But I think the strength that we've got is that we always concentrate on what we want it to be like and not really trying to please other people.

Basically I just had to say, 'Screw everyone around me - from now on I'm just gonna play what I think is important to me and our music.' So I gave the big finger to all the current trends in technical wizardry, and just went off and did what I felt was best for the songs.

I'd rather sink with my own vision than float with somebody else's.

I didn't come to Hollywood to be subservient to anyone else's vision.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

I try to please myself. I don't try to anticipate what people want to see.