Quotes from Alessia Cara

I don't think a lot of artists have the freedom that I have when it comes to dressing in general.

I want 'Scars to Your Beautiful' to reach different types of women. The girl I am talking about, it's me, it's you - it's every girl who has struggled with feeling not good enough. I want to talk about all the different extremes that girls go through to feel beautiful.

I first picked up a guitar when I was ten years old; my parents surprised me with it for my tenth birthday. I started taking lessons when I was thirteen, but only for a few months, and then I just kept teaching myself.

I'm definitely not a supermodel, a thousand per cent.

I was always told that music isn't a 'realistic' path to take, and like a normal human being, I doubted myself over and over because I was afraid of failure.

I'm unpolished, I guess.

Music was something I found on my own. I got my first guitar when I was around 10, and it just all developed over time.

Throughout my high school years, I was very quiet, I didn't have many friends. I distanced myself from a lot of people.

I've never hosted a party in my life, not even my own birthday party. I'd feel really uncomfortable saying, 'Hey everybody, let's celebrate me!' But I'm not antisocial. I don't hate people.

Realize that everyone that you think is perfect feels like they're not good enough, too.

We all act like we know everything in life, but nobody really does. That's what I want people to realize. For me, I know that I'm the same person. Nothing has changed. My family and friends know that.

I wanted to get through high school anonymously.

In late elementary school, early high school, I started losing my hair in chunks in the shower. It was one of the scariest things. It got to the point where it was visibly gone.

When I write, I like squeezing as many words as possible into each bar - I've listened to the Fugees and Lauryn Hill for as long as I can remember, so probably a big chunk of it subconsciously comes from that.

Ninety per cent of my family are hairdressers, and the other 10% are construction workers.

We all just need to love ourselves and believe in ourselves.

I don't really think I got the full high school experience, only because when I got to high school for the first year, it was grades 9-10. We didn't have older grades. But besides that, it was normal. It was a regular public school. We didn't have much going on. It wasn't too crazy.

I had a fairly regular childhood. I was a pretty boring kid. I didn't do much. I was always thinking, but I didn't really say a lot.

I don't wear a lot of makeup ever, even when I do interviews or when I'm on TV. I just keep it me, and I think it's important to show people I'm a regular person and regular people are beautiful, too.

That's all I ever wanted to do: put out music from the heart that people could relate to.

Being in the public eye, you're always worried about what angle people are going to take pictures of you at. I don't really care anymore.

I just dress how I wanna dress. Not to say that I don't care about how I dress or that I'm a slob or anything like that... I just don't have to worry about the outside opinions of what people are saying.

I've never been one to crave attention, which I know means that this is probably the worst career to pick. I get anxious even when people come up to me for pictures sometimes. That's the one thing that makes me hesitant about my future. But I love music too much to not do it.

The biggest critics are in the comments online. People are so judgmental of me. It's like, 'Why is she wearing this?' or 'Why isn't she wearing that?' or 'Why does she talk like that?' That's the worst because they're judging for no reason.