Urban Struggles Quotes

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.

I'm from a rough place: the Bronx.

Where I grew up in Brooklyn, nobody committed suicide. Everyone was too unhappy.

We really just live our life. We rap about our life, where we from, our city, what we've been through, from the streets to losing people to being in prison. Everything you hear is reality for us.

I grew up in the inner city. It wasn't a joke.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

I didn't want to make a literal film about Detroit, because it felt like what they were experiencing was more universal than that.

There are so many people in Memphis who have real reasons to be angsty, but I was just a suburban white kid with all this misplaced rage.

I'm very ambitious, despite all the challenges I face in the streets.

Newark faces real challenges.

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune.

If you're a New Yorker, there are two things that are most important: a car and a washer and dryer. Literally everyone else in America has those things! It's so weird to them that these are our luxuries. You can eat at Per Se every night, but I don't have a car or washer and dryer!

I wanted to represent the brothas I have seen when I go to the rhythm section of Oakland, hearing brothas speak and tell me about their journeys. Men who have been to prison and found themselves, brothas who have made mistakes but are loving their wives and children, trying to protect them and educate them. These men do exist.

In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.

New York is a wonderful place to be up, an awful place to be down.

In New York, pretending to be above the struggle means no seat on the bus and a table next to the kitchen.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

I certainly knew the hard side of urban life, stop-and-search.

My mom is from Jamaica and she was going to school in the morning, and in the evening she was working, and at night she would go to night school and then come in and go to sleep. So she would never watch the news and stuff like that and she didn't know what crack was. She didn't know nothing about it, but when I told her I was selling crack, she threatened to kick me out of the house. And then I just started paying for stuff - paying her bills and giving her money, so she'd just tell me to be careful because there was nothing she could do to stop it.