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When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name.

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
Names
Couldn
Hands
Choose
School
Terrible
Firsts
Week
First
Answers
Things
Name
Would
Hand
England
Came
Answer

More quotes by M.I.A.

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I named my first album after my dad because I wanted to find him. My second album was named after my mom because I felt like I learned all my creative talents I learned from her.
M.I.A.
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Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
M.I.A.
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There's a bit of hope that a song can be about anything. If you want to write a song about anything, you can, and you don't have to put it through the process of having it be trendy or cool or generic pop or these types.
M.I.A.
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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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It could be the sort of declining grip of the American MTV-nation culture-the fact that MTV doesn't play so much music anymore.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
M.I.A.
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Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.
M.I.A.
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Somebody told me that if you wake up every day and do stuff that's easy, then you're doing the wrong thing. If you wake up every day and do stuff that's really hard and you manage to get through to people, then you're doing the right thing. They might have just fooled me by telling me that, but it worked. I think that's my philosophy.
M.I.A.
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You have to constantly redefine who you are.
M.I.A.
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I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyones perception of me.
M.I.A.
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My statements aren't incomplete, they're just in-progress. It's a debate and a discussion.
M.I.A.
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If music's a political place, I'm out.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.
M.I.A.
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Everything I think seems to be controversial, so I feel like I need to just go away for a second and put it all down on paper until the storm passes.
M.I.A.
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The music industry was invented, like, 100 years ago. I'm talking about the goddess Matangi, who invented music 5,000 years ago. She was the only thing that inspired me.
M.I.A.
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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 . . .
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.