Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Mitski

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Japanese musician Mitski.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
Mitski

Mitski Miyawaki is a Japanese-born American singer-songwriter. Mitski self-released her first two albums, Lush (2012) and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013), while studying studio composition at Purchase College's Conservatory of Music. These albums were created originally as her senior project at Purchase. She released her third studio album, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, in 2014 through Double Double Whammy after graduating. She then signed with Dead Oceans in 2015 and released her critically acclaimed albums Puberty 2 (2016), Be the Cowboy (2018) and Laurel Hell (2022), the last of which entered the top ten in several territories. The Guardian dubbed her the "best young songwriter" in the United States.

Miyazaki movies were what I was raised on. I've watched them since I was very young, and I've been greatly shaped by them.
I think it's our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we're able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn's case, we as artists somehow made it 'cool' enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.
As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent. — © Mitski
As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.
I think people don't realize how little of being an artist is making art.
I was one of those girls people called 'intense.'
Everything is so chaotic and messy in the world, and I have always felt kind of dirty.
I've been very careful to always make clear that I am a real person. That's why I'm on social media a lot.
Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.
I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to.
I feel like I've always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.
I'm not an innovator.
I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.
I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.
I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record... that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.
On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.
I'm so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head. — © Mitski
I'm so smart. I am good at doing math really quickly in my head.
I tend to kind of try to use what's in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don't already have.
When you're young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.
I couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do.
I've been asked whether I have a hobby, and have felt strangely offended that anyone would assume I have the time.
You always want what you can't have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.
I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, 'I love this place.'
I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.
I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in 'Teardrops On My Guitar,' and she was like, 'Isn't this song great?' And everyone was like, 'Who's Taylor Swift?' And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.
I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.
When you love someone and care about them, you want what's best for them, and it's always the hardest thing to realize maybe you aren't what's best for them, how hard you try.
All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.
You can never learn enough about music.
Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.
I think my real influences are out of my control, which are the things that entered my brain when I was a kid growing up.
I have a very conveniently photographic memory of emotions - it's overwhelming, because things don't fade for me.
I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.
When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to... I finally feel like myself.
I don't think 'bleak' is a bad thing.
I think it's very dangerous as an artist to be comfortable.
The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.
Music was the one thing that was just mine, and no one could take it from me. I created it, dictated it, and it made me not able to let go of it.
When you are a minority, it's your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work. Then you start to realise, 'Oh, I'm bending a lot,' and they're just standing there existing, and I'm bending around them. But you can't blame them: they don't realise it; that's just how they already existed. It's hard.
I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.
I think music is supposed to be shared. — © Mitski
I think music is supposed to be shared.
I didn't fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive, I created this 'ideal America.' Finally I came to the U.S. and realised, 'Oh, I don't belong here, either.'
I'd always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there's a sense that you're never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.
I always have strong urges to sabotage myself. Whenever someone says they like something about my music, I tend to not want to do that anymore. It's not even that I don't like it anymore: it's that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.
Oftentimes, the most important decisions I make are the ones I don't put much thought into.
I know for a fact that I'm problematic. I shouldn't be looked to for any kind of guidance.
It's nice to know there's a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I'm not the center of the world - in a good way.
I don't want to be elitist.
I'm punk, but I love gold.
I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.
Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.
I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed. — © Mitski
I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed.
You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you're okay with who you are or where you came from.
It's very tempting, when somebody says they like this about you, to want to do that over and over.
I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don't know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.
I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that's important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.
If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.
I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.
In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.
When you're doing something you're not used to, you kind of realize that you're still a kid: even though the whole world around you sees you as an adult and you're expected to act like an adult, you still haven't actually grown up.
When someone is a musician - trying to make a living off being a public figure - it's really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn't have a personal life.
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