El-P Quotes

Another way to think of this is there are now 6.8 billion people on this planet, and half of them weren't even born when we went to the moon, and so they don't have the perspective.

There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them.

There's a reason I moved to NYC, and if I listed all the musicians on my list you'd grow weary.

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

People misinterpret my emotions towards Nirvana because I've said things about how something happened with grunge that took a little bit of fun out of things. It's no offense to Nirvana; they were one of the greats, obviously. But something died there, too, and we haven't quite gotten the groove back.

This is not a happy time for this kind of music in this country.

As minorities and other immigrant groups become more important to our economy, the inner city is a crucible that gives us an early look at phenomena that are going to be spreading more broadly in the economy over time.

I'm wide open and will entertain anything anybody has to say, but if it's MTV and radio, well, they're great things, but can't be the only thing. I don't know that it would work even for the Beatles.

In many ways, Mitt Romney and I are very different. Different starts in life. Different paths to leadership. Different cultures.

Now that the black experience isn't viewed as box-office death, people are catching up to untapped auteurs.

The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art.

I think we need to take a step back and realize what the real issues are - it's not being from different places or being different.

I just believe that in Atlanta, we're creative; we got a lot of styles out here.

In a time like this, when records are not selling, he's the only one that is selling. You know, Drake and all the other ones [did well], but Em did [close to] 800,000 his first week, and he's #1 for the fifth week. It's incredible. I think he has a faithful fan base of people who have been following him for years. They're not going to stop following him and not stop listening to his music. Em said he didn't like his last album as much as this one. You can hear the difference. I like both of the albums. '3 a.m.' is one of my joints. But Eminem has followers that's gonna mess with him until the day he dies.

Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

Berlin is still a very edgy place, a very cosmopolitan place. It's a place where completely different ideas and cultures come together and clash in a very warm way. In a very warm-hearted way. It's a very young city. It's a vibrant city. It's an exciting city. It's a city that's also scarred by history. I think that's to be celebrated and graffiti is to be celebrated. Graffiti in Berlin is very different than when they spray something on the wall dividing the west bank and Israel. And should be treated as such in Berlin.

You think the only people who are people, Are the ones who look and think the way you do, But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, You'll learn the things you never knew you never knew... You can own the Earth and still, All you'll own is earth until You can paint with all the colors of the wind.

I think it's a wonderful time to be a black woman who makes films. It's a good time to be an artist period. Traditional models of making and consuming art are breaking down and being rebuilt. I find that to be incredibly exciting as a filmmaker and film marketer.

The whole cultural diversity and musical diversity, I think they almost go hand in hand, you know? It's like a mind space or a it's having an open mind to what else is out there.

I think that these are different times, and different things are available to artists, and certain things have become passé. You've already seen the outcome of a lot of things that seemed to have a lot of potential. We've already heard that, and I can't tell you if it made a difference or not. But we already know that artists can do that, and they shouldn't feel threatened by doing it. They're probably not going to change the world. They're going to change a few people's perspectives and maybe make somebody's day at times, if they can.

In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.

I'm envious of the way that electronic dance music has organised itself. It has been able to understand what it ain't rather than what it is. And I think that slipped away from hip-hop as soon as the DJs lost the majority of the say so in the direction of the music.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary. There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race. There is a cultural diversity that's very valuable, and it's valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?