“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.”

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

Even when I was still a child I cut out pictures of prams from newspapers and imagined the feeling of pushing my own pram through fresh winter snow and seeing the wheels’ tracks behind me in the snow.

Everyone’s been on the “hip-hop is dead” campaign for years, and now it’s the most unsure-of-itself genre ever.

I started freestyling with friends about eight or nine years ago. I started writing also around the same time, but didn’t meet blockhead until about ’94. I started making beats not until about ’96.

Dance constitutes a true recapturing of… freedom and childish play.

People are very adamant about maintaining a certain sound or a certain era, like, “There were three years of rap that were great, so let’s just keep doing that.” The genre itself is just stuck in place. It’s been treading water for a while.

The alleycats manipulate the blocks with gutter magic

If I had interesting things to say, I would have been a speechwriter.

I’ve been able to sell records still. I want to be the guy that stands out there and says thank you personally to everyone. And I try after my shows and kick it because I want to genuinely say thanks.