Zadie Smith Quotes

Although rap is about boasting, it's also about honesty and expressing your emotions.

In Germany, I have been called the Queen of Kitsch, but I don't mind that - as long as people buy the books.

Speaking out against rap music is useless, and it's futile. The reality is there's criticism for everything, but Jay-Z is one of the most remarkable artists of our time of any genre, and as a hip-hop artist he carries the weight of that art form with such splendor and grace and genius.

This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.

Harlem World' is all about me doing my thing.

The great thing about 'Hamilton,' for me, is so many people have been exposed to and are more open to hip-hop and certain artists, despite the stigma that had before been attached to it.

I feel like when people are talking about how they make music or how they are the biggest rapper, I don't understand how that's relatable to people.

I said to my kids, 'Learn the business of America if you want to be an artist in America. The rest of that stuff, the art part, you could pick up in an hour and a half.'

When I'm in the studio with other rappers, we talk about social issues.

Even if great poetry continues to be written, it has retreated from the center of literary life. Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the general culture.

Ego is my career. Rap music is all ego.

Hip-hop ain't died because of the South, that's retarded.

The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

Hip-hop was the culture that I grew up with; I am part of this culture.

To me, it doesn't feel like it's just another rock record that somebody put out. It feels like we taped into the culture a little bit

Rather than trying to put an end to Eminem or some other rapper, politicians should think about why they're rapping. It's easier to try to censor some kid who's swearing about poverty than it is to stop the poverty.

In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present.

You can't write for the cultural environment - if you do that, by the time it comes out, that cultural environment has passed. You have to be aiming for something that's original - that's the only way you can have any kind of impact.

I feel that what I do is always contemporary with the society I'm living in... If I wanted to explain myself, that's how I'd explain myself: that I'm a diarist.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.

Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.

I am generalizing, of course, but in hip-hop, it's like you get this shine for using the word "pussy" a billion times, and I think that that's weirdly healthier than not doing it at all - even though I really hope it ends soon because, you know, how many decades can we do that?

I don't agree with most forms of censorship, and I especially don't agree with the idea that one needs to be from the same cultural, ethnic, or religious background as the subjects they portray in order to be qualified to portray those subjects. I believe that compassion and empathy should cross all of those category barriers, and the conversations art creates can be inflammatory initially, but I think are most often constructive and healing in the long run.