If music's a political place, I'm out.

You have to have your fashion stylist person not sell out and sell your s - t to another pop star because they can pay them twice as much, and do it for the belief and the love of art.

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."

You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it.

I just think that funerals are a lot like death itself. You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control.

I come from a generation where you put the art out and had the luxury to sit back and watch the world deconstruct it, and that was valued. Unfortunately now the work lives in a weird context.

When I first came out, I was a film student and my mom sewed clothes. I was already doing a million things then, whatever it took to survive. If I had to braid someone's hair to get one pound for my lunch money, that's what I did. But I did it in the most creative way possible.