I love what I do, and when you love what you do, you want to be the best at it.
JAY-ZWe wasn’t allowed inside the galleries or inside Yankee Stadium. We were writing in the street and making music.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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If you look at my career and you look at the span of my work and the things I have done, as far as to garner fame, you’ll see that I have turned down more interviews than I do. Or I turn down more things than I do.
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We have to stretch out the audience. It can’t be this narrow – we have to stretch out the point of view.
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I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.
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When you have a reputation for making not only good songs but great albums, that in itself creates added artistic pressure. But, at the end of the day, I guess that pressure is something I welcome.
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People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name.
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Around 20. I’d been trying to transition from the streets to the music business, but I would make demos and then quit for six months. And I started to realize that I couldn’t be successful until I let the street life go.
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By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.
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Hip-hop has done more for race relations than most cultural icons; and I say save Martin Luther King, because his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech was realized when Obama was elected into office.
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I’m just saying the producers and people who work on music are getting left out – that’s when it starts getting criminal. It’s like you’re working hard, and you’re not receiving. In any other business, people would be standing before Congress. They have antitrust laws against this kind of behavior.
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I think that’s what happened to the record business when ‘Napster’ came around. The industry rejected what was happening instead of accepting it as change.
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Wherever I go, I bring the culture with me, so that they can understand that it’s attainable. I didn’t do it any other way than through hip-hop.
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I don’t think any rapper can go back. You can be a car salesman, a bank teller – I mean, really good jobs, and people are still gonna look at you and be like, ‘You used to rap; what happened?’
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I think reviews have lost a lot of their importance now because of the Internet; everyone is experiencing things at the same time.
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What are you talking about? Wait a minute, you’re getting out of the zone.’ People hate when people cross lines.
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We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we’d pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off.
JAY-Z