If you look up, and you see that all of a sudden the world is really coming down on people with brown hair, I would think the people with black hair would look at that and go, 'Well, that could be me, and so, I shouldn't stand for that any more than those people with brown hair stand for it.'

The idea of the beauty of diversity came from just growing up where I grew up. Los Angeles is a very big city - there's Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, there's African-Americans, Latinos, Europeans.

I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.

My dad was a professional musician; my mom played, too, but just for fun. All my siblings played. The house was full of music books, videos, albums. I guess it's not surprising that I ended up becoming a musician.

I was 14 when I decided I wanted to start doing music and stuff. I was a really big fan of Ben Howard, and he put out a really amazing album in 2014, and then, after being inspired by my dad and Lady Gaga and Ed Sheeran, I wanted to start writing songs.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.

I think writing gives me creative freedom.

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.