I’m hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That’s what this world is about.
JAY-ZYour job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out.
More Jay-Z Quotes
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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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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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Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?
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I don’t have any fear of working with Samsung because I’m not gonna let them put a phone on my forehead; that’s just never gonna happen.
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If your dad died before you were born, yeah, it hurts – but it’s not like you had a connection with something that was real. Not to say it’s any better – but to have that connection and then have it ripped away was, like, the worst.
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All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I’m feeling at the time, whatever direction I’m heading in.
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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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Music is everywhere – you consume it every day, everywhere you go. The content creator should be compensated. It’s only fair.
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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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I’ve never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people.
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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 know I’m a different person. But nothing can erase that era, those times, those memories, those fights to get ‘Roc-A-fella’ where it was.
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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 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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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.
JAY-Z