For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton… it’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians – by America in general.
JAY-ZAs 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.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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Primarily I see myself as so much more than a rapper. I really believe I am the voice for a lot of people who don’t have that microphone or who can’t rap.
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I have no idea what my teacher’s intentions were – whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.
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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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I think relationships are broken up because of the media.
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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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I 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?
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I grew up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and my mom and pop had an extensive record collection, so Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and all of those sounds and souls of Motown filled the house.
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Companies that pretend to care about music and really care about other things – whether it be hardware, whether it be advertising – and now they look at music as a loss leader. And we know music isn’t a loss leader; music is an important part of our lives.
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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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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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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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I have inherited two of the most important brands in hip-hop, Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella. Reid and Universal Music Group have given me the opportunity to manage the companies I have contributed to my whole career. I feel this is a giant step for me and the entire artist community.
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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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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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It wasn’t until sixth grade, at P.S. 168, when my teacher took us on a field trip to her house that I realized we were poor.
JAY-Z