When I came into the music, I was forced to be a CEO. I was forced to be an entrepreneur; I was forced to… because I was looking for a deal. I didn’t have this grand scheme of starting a record company and then morphing into a clothing empire.
JAY-ZReligion is like a personal computer. You let people in if you want to… We’re all gods.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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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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When the TV version of Annie came on, I was drawn to it. It was the struggle of this poor kid in this environment and how her life changed. It immediately resonated.
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Excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That’s just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it… that’s excellence.
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One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal.
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Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who’ve never done anything because if you haven’t been successful, then you don’t know how it feels to lose it all.
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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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The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need: it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden.
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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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My mom always taught me – you know, little boys listen to their moms too much – that whatever you put into something is what you’re going to get out of it.
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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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I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can.
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It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day.
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Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who’ve never done anything because if you haven’t been successful, then you don’t know how it feels to lose it all.
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Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don’t think it’s given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely.
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If I go into a studio and find my truth of the moment, there are a number of people in the world who can relate to what I’m saying and are going to buy into what I’m doing. Not because it’s the new thing of the moment, but because it’s genuine emotion. Its how I feel. This is how I articulate the world.
JAY-Z