The 30 Best Fiona Apple Quotes

The 45-year-old New York City-born Fiona Apple is one of the most mysterious and beloved artists in music today.

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To date, Apple has released five albums, including her most recent in 2020, Fetch to Bolt Cutters. She has garnered three Grammy Awards and a number of other accolades.

[RELATED: Fiona Apple Cover’s Sharon Van Etten’s “Love More” for Anniversary Double-LP, ‘epic Ten’]

She rose to fame with her song “Criminal” in 1996 from the album, Tidal. Her third album, Extraordinary Machine, in 2005, was exquisite.

While Apple has garnered praise, she has also talked about difficult times in her life, including drug use and painful relationships. Apple has seen a lot of the world and has a keen eye and a unique mode of expression.

So, it only stands to reason to want to know what the artist has to say about the world around her, about the idea of love, her craft, and life itself.

Here are the 30 best Fiona Apple quotes.

1. “I resent limitations. I’m going to be this way for a while.”

2. “No, I’ve never wanted kids. But I do read about parenting a lot.”

3. “I also just accept that I might never want to write a song again.”

4. “I’m here because of what I write. Obviously, I must know something.”

5. “In a strange way, I’m way more comfortable onstage than anywhere else.”

6. “I really don’t think anything I do is a mistake. It could be if I didn’t learn from it.”

7. “I don’t know if anybody wants to mix their politics with their entertainment.”

8. “You know, I’ve always thought that it would be really funny if somebody made a romantic comedy where absolutely everything went well from beginning to end.”

9. “I never thought I’d be in a position where people would be talking about my sexuality and saying how good I look in underwear.”

10. “Sometimes interviews are fun and good conversations, but stuff like photo shoots and appearances at places where you have to meet a lot of people—I was never really made for this kind of stuff.”

11. “Hearing my songs in public freaks me out a bit. There was one restaurant I really liked in L.A., but I had to stop going there when they started playing my music. It felt kinda awkward.”

12. “Life is all about the friendship and the love and the music. It sounds silly, but it is. I want to have that experience as much as I can as an adult, not as a kid doing something that people are telling her she has to do. If anyone gets in my way, I’m going to get them out of my way.”

13. “I was never somebody who grew up going, ‘I really want to be a singer in a band,’ and I never had any ambition toward anything, really.”

14. “Nothing that you do will ever feel good if you let people convince you that you have no choice.”

15. “Rape is the most humiliating thing that can be done to you; it’s the most vulnerable that you can be. But once I realized that I became a stronger person and faced all my fears.”

16. “When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be even lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anybody or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.”

17. “My whole life, people have been saying, Why are you so angry?”

18. “If I have one success in my relationship history, it’s with the people who listen to my music. I think that they’ll be there with me forever, and I’ll be there with them forever. And I’m totally satisfied with that.”

19. “The worst pain in the world is shame. I spend a lot of time trying not to do anything bad to anyone, but you can’t live your life and not hurt people.”

20. “Because for whatever reason, even though I want to stay home all the time and be left alone, I want to tell the world who I am now.”

21. “Five years from now I’m probably going to look back on the things I’m doing and cringe.”

22. “I was told so many times when I was a kid, ‘I can’t be friends with you, you’re too intense, you’re too sad all the time.’ I really thought that when I made the first album that everyone would understand me, all the people who weren’t my friends would become my friends.”

23. “You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what’s around you. You go crazy that way.”

24. “I walk my dog at dawn because I don’t like people to be around.”

25. “I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o’clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.”

26. “I got a lot of problems, but I’m really good at intuiting what I need to do to be happy with whatever I create. I know when to stop myself, I know when to start, I know when to leave something alone. I guess I just kind of indulge that completely, and so I just take my time.”

27. “I was so self-critical. I still am, but it’s not as bad anymore.”

28. “I have a very steadfast tendency to parent myself, to monitor my development into the person I want to be. I’ve tried to keep the corruption minimal.”

29. “I wrote ‘Criminal’ in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.”

30. “The way I feel about music is that there is no right and wrong. Only true and false.”

Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

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