I just want it to be timeless and timely at the same time.

Music was my life...It was everything to me, even though I was in school majoring in English. I was still very focused on music and always finding ways to perform, so that was what set me up to want to become a recording artist.

It's an artist's duty to reflect the times in which we live.

It's important for us to fight for certain changes that need to happen. And one of those issues that I really care about is education. But also another one is incarceration.

The struggle for freedom and justice is now.

You can't be a 25-year-old forever.

Black people invented jazz. But this story [in La La Land] wasn't ever claiming to be that. It's just a story about two people from one writer's point of view.