Quote

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.

M.I.A.

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M.I.A.
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 18
Activist
Actor
Composer
Fashion Designer
Model
Music Video Director
Musician
Painter
Photographer
Rapper
Record Producer
Singer-Songwriter
Ventura County
California
Mathangi Arulpragasam
Maya Arulpragasam
Film
Hair
Pounds
Someone
Already
Student
Firsts
Millions
Survive
First
Came
Mom
Sewed
Way
Creative
Million
Braid
Things
Possible
Clothes
Braids
Whatever
Students
Pound
Money
Took
Lunch

More quotes by M.I.A.

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I felt pissed off because I realized that you have to teach people in a clichéd way how to be happy-and happiness has become too one thing in American media. Achieving happiness is not really about having a flat stomach and the best car.
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I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyones perception of me.
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If it's just politics that's running music, f - k that. I'm out of here! I can't think of anything more boring.
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Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
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I feel like I'm living in the dead weeds of hip-hop. I live in the graveyard of what went wrong with hip-hop.
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My statements aren't incomplete, they're just in-progress. It's a debate and a discussion.
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I fly like paper, get high like planes If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name
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By the time it came to the 90s, the late 90s, being a businessman was the beacon to uphold. We've been having the concept of the best rapper equals the best businessman.
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Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.
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What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.
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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.
M.I.A.
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If you're talking about coexisting and tolerance then you have to live by example, and you can't have shiny people all the time everywhere, which is what breeds that sort of thinking - this is better than this, that is better than that.
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What's wrong with hip-hop [is that] it became so one-dimensional it became like a businessman thing. It's run out of creativity. It went so far off about making money that now everyone can do it.
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I wanted to represent a different decade, and I wanted someone who goes back further than me. I go back the furthest on this thing, I never really noticed that before. I'm going to have to fix that or I'm going to look really old.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.
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If music's a political place, I'm out.
M.I.A.
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In England right now you're not good enough until you get validated.
M.I.A.
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Whoever's inside is inside whoever's out is out.
M.I.A.
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Confidence takes constant nurturing, like a bed, it must be remade every day.
M.I.A.