Taylor Swift has been everywhere over the past couple of months — on talk shows, magazine covers, even outside her apartment posing with her cat.
Below, we rounded up her best quotes from the 1989 press tour. Here are Taylor’s recent thoughts on:
Feminism:
“I wish when I was 12 years old, I’d been able to watch a video of my favorite actress explaining in such an intellectual, beautiful, poignant way the definition of feminism,” Swift said about the power of Emma Watson’s speech. “I would have understood it and earlier on in my life would have proudly claimed that I was a feminist, because I would have understood what the word means. So many girls out there say, ‘I’m not a feminist,’ because they think it means something angry, or disgruntled, or complaining, or they picture rioting and picketing. It is not that at all. It simply means you believe women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.” -on Tout Le Monde En Parle
Female representation in media:
“Females are kind of pinned up against each other,” Swift explained. “For example, you’ll never see online ‘Vote for who has the better butt: this actor or this actor.’ It’s always this female singer or this female singer. It’s every day [for me]…. In order for us to have gender equality, we have to stop making it a girl fight, and we have to stop being so interested in seeing girls try and tear each other down. It has to be more about cheering each other on as women.” -on Tout Le Monde En Parle
Life Circa Now:
“Being on my own, prioritizing my girlfriends, my family and my music above everything else and trying things I never thought I’d try. It’s really been a liberating and freeing time.” -to People
Related
Her Fans:
“I love them so much because they always talk about dying. They’re like Rest in Peace Me, RIP Me, I died, DEAD.” -to the Graham Norton Show
Adam Levine:
“You learn things about these coaches. Like you learn their weaknesses. Like Adam Levine’s weakness are musical theatre songs. Did you know that? It’s to the point that if you sing songs from Rent you can actually render Adam Levine helpless on the floor.” -joking around on Ellen
Having Kids:
“I don’t know if I’ll have kids. It’s impossible not to picture certain scenarios and how you would try to convince them that they have a normal life when, inevitably, there will be strange men pointing giant cameras at them from the time they are babies.” -to InStyle
Privacy:
“There’s someone whose entire job it is to figure out things that I don’t want the world to see. They look at your career, they look at what you prioritize, and they try to figure out what would be the most revealing or hurtful. Like, I don’t take my clothes off in pictures or anything – I’m very private about that. So it scares me how valuable it would be to get a video of me changing. It’s sad to have to look for cameras in dressing rooms and bathrooms. I don’t walk around naked with my windows open, because there’s a value on that.” -to Rolling Stone
“Welcome To New York”:
“That song is about the kind of wide-eyed optimism with which I approached my move to New York. I was so excited by the idea of embarking on a new adventure, and the way that that song sounds is basically mirroring that emotion, like, “Anything’s possible here.” -to Billboard
Dating:
“It’s not that [I’ve sworn off dating] as much as I’m just very protective of my happiness. I found a place in my life that feels really great and I’m not willing to compromise that for just anyone, and so, you can paraphrase that all you want into something very extreme, but they make what I say extreme no matter what I say…So I’m really happy about the fact that being single doesn’t feel like being alone. I have love in my life, I just don’t have a relationship, and that feels really natural right now.” -to E News
“I feel like watching my dating life has become a bit of a national pastime. And I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore. I don’t like seeing slide shows of guys I’ve apparently dated. I don’t like giving comedians the opportunity to make jokes about me at awards shows. I don’t like it when headlines read ‘Careful, Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You,’ because it trivializes my work. And most of all, I don’t like how all these factors add up to build the pressure so high in a new relationship that it gets snuffed out before it even has a chance to start.” -to Rolling Stone
Marriage:
“I’m too young to get married. Not age-wise, but I know myself, so why try to meet someone right now when I know I’m too young to do something serious?”-to InStyle
The appeal of 1989:
“This album was made completely and solely on my terms, with no one else’s opinion factoring in, no one else’s agenda factoring in. I didn’t feel that I was having to think too hard about the musical direction. In the past, I’ve always tried to make sure that I was maintaining a stronghold on two different genres, and this time I just had to think about one, which was creatively a relief. It was nice to be honest about what I was making.” -to Billboard