I decided that I wanted to be an artist in middle school, and although my mom wasn't fully on board with me becoming a trainee, she really supported me throughout the years and is very proud of me now.

My mom is a painter and an artist. She would play music, and she always had very good taste in music, fashion, and art. She was also a young single mom, so I think she had really good style; she was really free... just really inspiring in her own way and allowed me to find the direction I wanted to take in my life.

Reading has made me more open, has improved my understanding, and has made me a better artiste, but it also makes me live in my own bubble. My mom keeps asking me, 'What do you read in that room the whole day?' Once I am into a book, I will finish it.

My mom's an artist in every way. She's a painter, a photographer. She's a wanderer - always searching, always seeing. I guess you could say my mom gave me her eyes.

I grew up in a bus, traveled with various circuses and freak shows. I was a trapeze artist, and that was my dream. We just traveled the whole world, me and my mom and my little brothers and sisters. It was an adventure.

I love 'Sunday in the Park with George.' I saw that when I was just, just starting theater school, and I remember singing 'Finishing the Hat' or at least reading the lyrics to 'Finishing the Hat' and other songs from 'Sunday in the Park with George' to my mom to try to explain why I wanted to be an artist.

My mom was an orphan, and there was never anybody to tell her what she could or couldn't do. At the core, she's probably an artist - an artist and a feminist.

Artists, writers and people in creative fields are entrepreneurs by necessity. Nobody gives them a paycheck or picks up their medical insurance. The ones who succeed learn to think and act like 'independent operators.' I think people who are technically 'employees' have to think this way as well. The company is not looking out for you.

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

Life is a painting, and you are the artist. You have on your palette all the colors in the spectrum - the same ones available to Michaelangelo and DaVinci.

I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

From the artist's standpoint, are you getting more from streaming than you used to, prior to the days of the Internet? No - and I don't know if those days are ever going to come back - but at least, technically speaking, it's the legal way to do it.

Taking legal action against pirates is a headache for artists like me.

For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn't afford all the music. So back in '98, '99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.

There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.

As an artist, you keep learning. You draw out different parts of you.

I am pretty bad at doing my makeup myself, so these days, I am learning from a makeup artist. I treat my face as a sketchbook and am gradually trying things that I learned from the artist.

When I was young, I remember feeling a real thirst for opportunities around the arts, for learning about how artists function and how institutions work.

I didn't have time to be anybody's muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.

An artist must be open to both appreciation and criticism. It's a part of the learning process, or else there is no growth.

There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.