Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.
JAY-ZI collect art, and I drink wine… things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, ‘I’m going to buy art to impress this crowd.’ That’s just ridiculous to me. I don’t live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?
More Jay-Z Quotes
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When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this ’cause we both were outcasts.
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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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People really feel like music is free but will pay $6 for water. You can drink water free out of the tap, and it’s good water. But they’re OK paying for it.
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I listen to everything – from Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette all the way down to rap like Scarface, UGK and Lauryn Hill.
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Religion is like a personal computer. You let people in if you want to… We’re all gods.
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I’ve always wanted to stay true to myself, and I’ve managed to do that. People have to accept that.
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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.
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Providing – that’s not love. Being there – that’s more important. I mean, we see that. We see that with all these rich socialites. They’re crying out for attention; they’re hurting for love. I’m not being judgmental.
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It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.
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I think relationships are broken up because of the media.
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I came into this music business at 26 years old. I was a fully developed man at that point. At that age, I didn’t have anything to prove.
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Nothing me and Kanye can do musically was gonna match the event of what we were trying to do. So we were trying to deliver an album and experience at one time; that was the idea for ‘Watch The Throne’.
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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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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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As kids, we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could.
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