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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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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
Wanted
Dad
Firsts
Mom
First
Second
Like
Talent
Learned
Talents
Creative
Named
Felt
Album
Find
Albums

More quotes by 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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You have to constantly redefine who you are.
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Confidence takes constant nurturing, like a bed, it must be remade every day.
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When mayors get together they probably have better conversations and have better notes to share about running different cities, and just do what suits. Basically, like when you combine all the religions and take the best bits, you should be able to combine all the cities and take the best bits, the information, the tried and tested things.
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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.
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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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In England right now you're not good enough until you get validated.
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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.
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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.
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We know that those huge U.S. brands do have political sway.
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With homogenized culture, even if you feel frustrated, you'd have to write a Taylor Swift song to get heard.
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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 . . .
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Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
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Instead of going to war, we should put the money into arts and culture and let creative people define what Britain is.
M.I.A.
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That divide between the rich and poor is so crazy, because even white kids are suffering now.
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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.
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Whoever's inside is inside whoever's out is out.
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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.
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Everyone has that moment where they just rebel.
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I dont support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.
M.I.A.