“I did the pandemic in four chunks. When it first hit, I was in LA, so I was there until you could move around. I was there for maybe 2 ½ months. I took like 6 weeks where I did absolutely nothing, and I started writing a lot after that first pause. […] We went back to Shangri-La, which is nice because it’s amazing, but also because you can stay there and we were able to bubble up.”
“I think maybe for 12 years family things have not always been able to be the priority in the way they should’ve been, or the way I would like them to be moving forward. You miss so many birthdays and stuff and eventually it’s kind of assumed you’re unable to be at stuff. I think that was one of the things where I want to invest some more time on balancing my life out a bit. Working is not everything about who I am, it’s something I do. I don’t want to be defined as a person by what I do all the time. I want to be able to put that down.”
“Home “in terms of a headspace or mental well-being,” as Styles put it. “It sounds like the biggest, and the most fun, but it’s by far the most intimate,” he said of the album.”
— about Harry’s Home to Better Homes & Gardens magazine
“I asked Styles this myself: Is he actually pleasant, normal, sane? “My producer keeps asking me when I’m going to have my big breakdown,” he said, laughing. “The most honest version I can think of is, I didn’t grow up in poverty by any means, but we didn’t have much money, and I had an expectation of what I could achieve in life. I feel like everything else has been a bonus, and I am so lucky.””
“In lockdown, I started processing a lot of stuff that happened when I was in the band,“ he said. He thought about the way he was encouraged to give so much of himself away, “to get people to engage with you, to like you.” He thought about the fact that no baby photos exist of him that aren’t on the internet (you give a bunch to an X Factor producer doing a piece on your backstory without much thought, and suddenly your childhood is online). He thought about the journalists asking questions, when he was still a teenager, about how many people he’d slept with and how, rather than telling them to go away, he would worry about how he could be coy without them leaving the room annoyed. “Why do I feel like I’m the one who has done something wrong?” he said to me, after we got up to shift spots in the park when a teenager started filming us for a prank video.”
“For a long time, it felt like the only thing that was mine was my sex life. I felt so ashamed about it, ashamed at the idea of people even knowing that I was having sex, let alone who with.At the time, there were still the kiss-and-tell things. Working out who I could trust was stressful,. But I think I got to a place where I was like, why do I feel ashamed? I’m a 26-year-old man who’s single; it’s like, yes, I have sex.”
“I’ve been really open with it with my friends, but that’s my personal experience; it’s mine. The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.”
