What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.

My experience has to be funnelled through a black experience or a white experience, or it doesn't exist, because that's how we're going to deal with the world.

In the beginning [of my career] I definitely felt a responsibility because I was representing a bunch of people [Sri lankans] who never got represented before. I felt this responsibility to correct that situation, to be like, "Look, you can't discriminate against refugees and Muslim people and blah, blah, blah . . ."

Businessmen in society are not going to be the ones that promote anything outside of money.

I don't have a community like a black community to belong to [with] a musical platform that's been built for years and years and years, or the film-making culture, and I don't have the white one to belong to.

Culturally, I found myself in a very weird situation: you were the person that had made that journey to the West, and then you were going back to comment on something, and then suddenly you were questioned and told, "You can't touch that now because you're a pop star."

If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.