Gza Quotes

I say if you don't write your lyrics, then you can't be the best rapper alive. Not at all. You can be one of the best artists, especially in rap, you gotta write everything yourself.

My favorite artist was probably Jay-Z. He's the one who inspired me to start writing music. He's a wordsmith. He's very clever. He uses a lot of similes and metaphors. He's a beast of a rapper.

I still to this day get the most inspiration from rap lyrics.

If you're really a rapper, you can't stop rapping.

Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life... That's a superpower I've been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions.

But I've been freestyling and messing around with rhyming since I was 13. That's when I really started listening to hip-hop music.

Hip-hop is not all '2 Chainz' - although '2 Chainz' is awesome. How he does that with metaphors, I don't know.

Some MCs don't take the time to take a beat home or just vibe with it and just figure out, 'How do I attack this track?'

People compare me to Kendrick. I've seen comparisons with Jay-Z, with Nas, with Chance The Rapper. I get a lot of Eminem comparisons.

Longevity always come from lyricism. From the people who can actually rap.

Emceeing has always been about making the most intellectual, most creative, wittiest rhyme as possible regardless of any subject. It was always about bringing the best out of yourself.

When I was growing up, to be an emcee meant to write the most clever, intellectual, and wittiest rap. And that's what we did.

Lil Wayne, that was one of my main influences, music-wise, because of his wordplay and metaphors.

A good rapper is an amazing thing to me. It's like a 17th-, 18th-century poet.

I used to print out lyrics from Nas songs and write my own lyrics in the same syllable count but with different words and different rhymes.

I am my own parent when it comes to rapping and do impromptu stuff. Being a rapper, you have to be good at improvising, like you give me a word and I have to rhyme it quickly and then make sense out of the rhyme.

I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.

I'm into the lyrical side of rap. I listen to some old Eminem songs and think, 'Wow, he's a genius.' He's one of the greatest poets of our time. Even when he's out of control, like on 'Cold Wind Blows,' it's incredible.

Not everybody is a great rapper; not everybody lives for the art of lyricism.

If you want to relate me to the newer cats, let's go. Let's go line for line and bar for bar. If it's all about spitting and metaphors and MCing and lyrics and entendres, I will eat 99 percent of you dudes up.

A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I have to be able to rap. I don't have the look. I don't have the typical slim-dude, fancy-clothes look. That's not me. I have to be able to rap - there is no other choice, or else I get eaten alive.

Being a student of hip-hop in general, you take technical aspects from places. You may take a rhyme pattern or flow from Big Daddy Kane or Kool G Rap.

The first album was 99 percent hard core to show you I was the best rhymer in the world.