Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's entertaining to watch somebody break my music down or explain what he thinks I was thinking during the process of making these records. Because... he has no idea.
People always ask me how long somebody can last as long as I've been lasting and continue to keep doing it, so I figured that people didn't really know how to do that.
I'm very good at separating things, and one of the things that I've always separated is that my business from one artist to the next has nothing to do with each other.
You need a sanctuary. Somewhere where it doesn't feel like it's being tainted by everybody's opinions and other people's money. I think I'm kind of homesick right now.
Everybody's able to pour into each other creatively, and pop into the studio and pop out. It feels like a community. As an artistic community I think it's really cool.
My brother died of cancer two years ago (1998), renal cell carcinoma. He was my only real brother and I didn't know what to do. I'd never been so desperate in my life.
There comes a time in every man's life when he's gotta handle up on his own. Can't depend on friends to help you in a squeeze, Please...they got problems of their own.
I think it's incredible what I've done. A lot of sweat. But as an innovator, I look back and can't help but go, 'Damn, there's things I could've done better, you know?'
I have a really beautiful life right now, so there is no reason to be hostile. I'm a husband, a father and a man who tries to do the right thing in life and in my work.
My son Darrel could recite 'Straight Outta Compton' at two years old. He loved it! You can expose your kids to anything as long as you sit there and explain it to them.
It has become much more difficult to smuggle dangerous substances across our borders over the past three years, and this is creating real problems for drug traffickers.
We know that if we can prevent kids from trying drugs in their teenage years, we dramatically reduce the likelihood that they will go on to have problems later in life.
I think the whole obsession with old gear is completely overblown. You don't need old-fashioned gear to make a great-sounding record. You don't even need [analog] tape.
It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.
I like to challenge myself, to see if I can actually write a pop album that people can connect with lyrically. Musically, it's very accessible - or, at least, I hope so.
I've always thought that reviews and knowing how much your fans appreciate or don't like something, that's the sugar coating. I'm trying not to think about those things.
I'm a menace to society, But girls in biker shorts are so fly to me. After the date, I'mma want to do the wild thing... You're talkin' lobster? I'm thinkin' Burger King.
I think rap music is the sole reason for a lot of black acceptance in pop culture; because the music is very popular, it gets our image out in other ways than in movies.
This life is a shadowy thing, lad. We live in a crowded space of lights and shadows, and when left to ourselves, we all too often fail to see the brightest light of all.
Regardless of how me or this man right here or anybody else in this business get, when we walk on an airplane in first-class looking like this, we're gonna get searched.
As far as anybody in the rap game ever tryin' to assassinate my character, that's impossible. You talkin' about a man who has always walked the walk and talked the talk.
I love the streets, and the streets love me back. And when things ain't going the way they should go, they let you know... and when they happy, you gotta keep 'em happy.
It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.
I would say, from an all-around point of view, Bruce Springsteen is one of the two great poet lords of America, Bob Dylan, coming out of the music world, the two of them.
I knew a lot of my musicians used to take coke. I never saw them. They would hide it from me, so I wasn't really aware of it. Creatively, I don't think it was that great.
I really need to push myself and try my hardest every time, because I come from the premise that I'm not very good and I have to give my best. Otherwise, I don't deliver.
Something I keep coming back to in my music is the tension between two extremes: healing and chaos, hope and anxiety - these big themes are inside us, flickering, all day.
You just have to find that thing that's special about you that distinguishes you from all the others, and through true talent, hard work, and passion, anything can happen.
I definitely know the minister Honorable Louis Farrakhan. But I don't really believe in organized religion like that. I don't know what it does for people in the long run.
As a kid, I didn't know much about Prince - who he was and all the complexities of his personality - but I could still feel very close to him when I listened to his music.
Queen can't work like any normal group. They utilise each others' talents to the fullest. A lot of the band's ideas are revolutionary, a lot of the style is revolutionary.
I ain't never preyed on the weak. I ain't never gone and picked on a guy that I knew I could beat up, even as a kid. People wanna make me seem like I'm [that] type of guy.
You have too take from each artist what works for you, and then create your own sound. You put different combinations in the mix and it becomes something unique in the end.
I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.
The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
I try to have things change before I get bored, and I figure other people might enjoy that too; I try not to let anything repeat for long enough that you can get used to it.
The difference between the headphones and making music, it's like, okay, I have a new business here that I'm proud of, but my soul still remains in the music-making process.
Unlike us, cats never outgrow their delight in cat capacities, nor do they settle finally for limitations. Cats, I think, live out their lives fulfilling their expectations.
The major labels, they roll with whatever is making money. I don't know if R&B turned into making banjo music and it sounded like blue grass, they'll buy it if it's selling.
You can't say that people don't love music anymore because they do. If we say that all the music stopped, if music stops now, the world can't handle that. We need our music.
When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman's vocal in front of my whole family.
I've been fighting my whole career to show a different side and prove naysayers - not prove them wrong, because I don't think you should get your energy from negative people.
Most of the problems that we have are brought on by the government and not by music. Music is a mirror of what we're going through, not the cause of what we're going through.
People associate clothes with actual behavior, and it's kind of crazy. If you get shot in some Levi's you don't go after Levi's. It's not the clothes. It's always the people.
'Band on the Run' is a carefully composed, intricately designed personal statement that will make it impossible for anyone to classify Paul McCartney as a mere stylist again.
You know the Singaporean. He is a hard-working, industrious, rugged individual. Or we would not have made the grade. But let us also recognise that he is a champion grumbler.
Seattle is like a global gumbo, a melting pot with all kinds of people - the rich, the poor, white people, some Chinese, Filipino, Jewish and black people - they're all here.
I have a problem with men that are supposed to be R&B artists that talk about women in a certain way, because you're supposed in the cornerstone of uplifting love in a sense.
When you a ghetto star, when you a hood star, you gonna take care of your grandmother, your mother. When you on that next level, you gotta take care of the city, the streets.
I do love voices so much that I will use them and manipulate them. The presence of a human voice in a piece of music is really exciting, even if it's just someone's breathing.