Jay-Z Quotes

Treat my first like my last and the last like my first and my thirst is the same as- when I came.

I keep my enemies close/ I give 'em enough rope/ They put themselves in the air/ I just kick away the chair.

We'll have a baby who stutters repeatedly We'll name him history

The Nets' a stone throw from where I used to throw bricks
... So it's only right I'm still tossing 'round Knicks.

THEY NEVER TAUGHT MARCUS GARVEY IN OUR SCHOOL CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS IS THEIR GOLDEN RULE

On the night he died - he was twenty-seven - Basquiat had been planning to see a Run-DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words: Royalty, heroism, and the streets.

This communist talk is so confusing

For me, the challenge is just making great albums, because talent - and writing in general - is not tangible. There's no expiration date on it. At the same time, you might wake up tomorrow and be unable to write music.

Everybody look at you strange, say you changed
Like you work that hard to stay the same.

The most amazing feeling I feel
Words can't describe what I'm feeling for real
Maybe I paint the sky blue
My greatest creation was you.

No matter where you go you are what you are player and you can try to change but that's just the top layer man you was who you was before you got here

The fans get to see you, and you can do great by your record if you have a great performance or a great night there. That's all part of the business. But at their core, awards shows are not really a sincere thing. For a lot of years, the artists had to pay to play their own set.

Difficult takes a day
Impossible takes a week
I do this in my sleep

And now we're lethal, infected with D'Evils

I will not lose, for even in defeat/There's a valuable lesson learned, so it evens up for me

My thing is related to who I am as a person. The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. 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. And hopefully, everyone follows.

Never prayed to God, I prayed to Gotti, that's right it's wicked, that's life I live it. Ain't askin' for forgiveness for my sins. I gotta get my soul right, I gotta get these Devils out my life. Lord forgive him, He got them dark forces in. connected to the high power. 666. I can introduce you to evil.

You know the type: loud as a motorbike but wouldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight.

You put the right artist on the right track in the studio and leave the door open to let God in.

You can want success all you want, but to get it, you can't falter. You can't slip. You can't sleep. One eye open, for real, and forever.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can't.

Used to rock a throwback ballin on the corner, now I rock tailored suit lookin' like a owner.

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. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.

Gotta keep it peace like a buddhist
Nobody gonna Wesley snipe me
It's less than likely,
Move back,
Let I breathe Jedi knight,
The more space I get the better I write,
(Oh) Never I write, but, if, ever I write,
I need the space to say whatever I like.

Without the work, the magic won't come.

Far from a Harvard student, just had the balls to do it

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

Man I'm high off life. Fuck it, I'm WASTED

If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow.

I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.
There's Heaven then there's Hell niggas
One day your cruisin' in your seven,
Next day your sweatin', forgettin' your lies,
Alibis ain't matchin' up, bullshit catchin' up
Hit with the RICO, they repoed your vehicle
Everything was all good just a week ago
'Bout to start bitchin' ain't you?
Ready to start snitchin' ain't you?
I forgive you. Weak ass, hustlin' just ain't you
Aside from the fast cars
Honeys that shake they ass in bars
You know you wouldn't be involved
With the Underworld dealers, carriers of mac-millers
East coast bodiers, West coast cap-peelers
Little monkey niggas turned gorillas.

I think relationships are broken up because of the media.

I smoked some weed, and that's how I finished 'Izzo.'

[T]he truth is you don't need some external demon to take control of you to turn you into a raging, money-obsessed sociopath, you only need to let loose the demons you already have inside of you.

Don't tell me what was said about me. Tell me why they were so comfortable to say it to you.

I dumbed down for my audience to double my dollars

We change people through conversation, not through censorship.

They say a midget standing on a giant's shoulders can see much further than the giant. So I got the whole rap world on my shoulders, they trying to see further than I am.

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.

We create music to express ourselves and when the world relates, that's a beautiful thing. We're all trading off each other's culture, so no matter what lines you put-country indie rock, rap, we're all somehow gonna find a way to come together.

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

In the end, you can't censor the truth, especially when it comes packaged in hot music.

Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.

I believe excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over.

The reason I've been groundedand able to make albums, is because I've allowed my friends to come with me and voice an opinion. That's who keeps you grounded, the people who have known you longest.

I really just like breaking down the barriers, whether it means doing an album with Linkin Park, an album with R. Kelly, or playing at the Brandenburg Gate with Bono.

If I don't show the world growth, how are we going to grow?

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

You not feeling me, fine. It costs you nothing, pay me no mind..

I'm a person that works off of music. I let the music dictate the direction.

For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton ... It's crazy. It's mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians, by America in general.

You can't turn a bad girl good, but once a good girls' gone bad, she's gone forever.

[T]he truth is that drug addicts have a disease. It only takes a short time in the streets to realize that out-of-control addiction is a medical problem, not a form of recreational or criminal behavior. And the more society treats drug addiction as a crime, the more money drug dealers will make "relieving" the suffering of the addicts.

I think Lil Wayne is extremely talented. I think he's one of the most talented ones out there.

I'm a hustler, baby; I sell water to a well!

Nine to five is how ya survive, I ain't trying to survive
I'm trying to live it to the limit and love it alive

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly.

The average rap life is two or three albums. You're lucky to get to your second album in rap!

When you listen to an album, it shouldn't feel like, "That's the girl song," "That's the club song." I shouldn't know what you're thinking while you're making the song. I don't want to know what the artist is thinking.

I have inherited two of the most important brands in hip-hop, Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella. Reid and Universal Music Group have given me the opportunity to manage the companies I have contributed to my whole career. I feel this is a giant step for me and the entire artist community.

And all you other cats throwin' shots at Jigga, | You only get half a bar: fuck y'all niggaz.

I'm trying to tell the story in the most clear, concise, and truthful way, taking those everyday words and phrases and capturing them in a way that they become something else.

Housing projects are a great metaphor for the government's relationship to poor folks: these huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives. People are still people, though, so we turned the projects into real communities, poor or not. We played in fire hydrants and had cookouts and partied, music bouncing off concrete walls. But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country. The rest of the country was freed of any obligation to claim us. Which was fine, because we weren't really claiming them, either.

Rap for me is like making movies, telling stories, and getting the emotions of the songs through in just as deep a way. And I grew up in rap and movies the same way.

I love that because that's what I'm supposed to be doing - whether it's accepted b everybody or not. I'm supposed to be pushing that envelope and trying new things. And people are supposed to say, Hov, you might have went too far.

Men lie, women lie, numbers dont

May the best of your today's be the worst of your tomorrow's

I thought I would be more inspired to have all these new feelings to talk about, but I really just want to hang out with my daughter.

Rappers, as a class, are not engaged in anything criminal. They're musicians. Some rappers and friends of rappers commit crimes. Some bus drivers commit crimes. Some accountants commit crimes. But there aren't task forces devoted to bus drivers or accountants. Bus drivers don't have to work under the preemptive suspicion of law enforcement. The difference is obvious, of course: Rappers are young black men telling stories that the police, among others, don't want to hear. Rappers tend to come from places where police are accustomed to treating everybody like a suspect. The general style of rappers is offensive to a lot of people. But being offensive is not acrime, at least not one that's on the books. The fact that law enforcement treats rap like organized crime tells you a lot about just how deeply rap offends some people
they'd love for rap itself to be a crime, but until they get that law passed, they come after us however they can.

I'm far from being god, but I work god damn hard.

I got 99 Problems but Mitt ain't one.

I can think of no one more relevant and credible in the hip-hop community to build upon Def Jam's fantastic legacy and move the company into its next groundbreaking era.

You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?

Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off for me?

I collect art, and I drink wine ... things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?

But that's a good match for the way I've always approached life. I've always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It's allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I'm supposed to be doing next. Stories have ups and downs and moments of development followed by moments of climax; the storyteller has to keep it all together, which is an incredible skill. But poetry is all climax, every word and line pops with the same energy as the whole; even the spaces between the words can feel charged with potential energy. It fits my style to rhyme with high stakes riding on every word and to fill every pause with pressure and possibility. And maybe I just have ADD, but I also like my rhymes to stay loose enough to follow whatever ideas hijack my train of thought, just like I like my mind to stay loose enough to absorb everything around me.

We give violent movies a pass but come down hard on a rapper like Scarface, who is ultimately a storyteller just like Brian de Palma. And neither of them is responsible for the poverty and violence that really do shape people's lives
not to mention their individual choices.

Be true to yourself- and keep things simple. People complicate things

When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That's why I'm always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down.

One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don't like to think of themselves as poor. It's embarrassing. When you're a kid, even in the projects, one kid will mercilessly snap on another kid over minor material differences, even though by the American standard, they're both broke as shit.

Everything evens up, you just wait, Even a garbage can gets a steak, You ain't even a garbage can, you have faith!

Remind your self. Nobody constructed like you, you style your self.

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.

There's the gift, there's the spirit, and there's the work-all three have to come together. If one of those things is off, it can stop you from becoming who you were meant to be.

I gave you prophecy on my first joint, and y'all lamed out
Didn't really appreciate it, 'til the second one came out

Everyone needs a chance to evolve.

I was forced to be an artist and a CEO from the beginning, so I was forced to be like a businessman because when I was trying to get a record deal, it was so hard to get a record deal on my own that it was either give up or create my own company.

Can I hit it in the morning with out giving you have of my dough?

I got this black chick, she don't know how to act
Always talkin' out her neck, makin' her fingers snap
She like, Listen Jigga Man, I don't care if you rap
You better - R-E-S-P-E-C-T me

Only God can judge me so I'm gone, either love me or leave me alone.

Either love me or leave me alone.
- jay-z

Boxing is a glorious sport to watch and boxers are incredible, heroic athletes, but it's also, to be honest, a stupid game to play. Even the winners can end up with crippling brain damage. In a lot of ways, hustling is the same. But you learn something special from playing the most difficult games, the games where winning is close to impossible and losing is catastrophic: You learn how to compete as if your life depended on it. That's the lesson I brought with me to the so-called "legitimate" world.

I pimp hard on a trick, look / Fuck if ya leg broke, bitch - hop up on ya good foot

Remind yourself. Nobody built like you, you design yourself.

I got mouths to feed til they put flowers on me.

I've never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people. I've always wanted to stay true to myself, and I've managed to do that. People have to accept that.

Electing a black man named Barack Obama President in the same country that elected George W. Bush - twice! - is as far-fetched as a hustler from Marcy performing at that President's inauguration. But it happened.

You ain't gotta go to church to find your God.

I ain't lookin' at you dudes -I'm lookin' past you.

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. My dad was such a good dad that when he left, he left a huge scar. He was my superhero.

The genius thing that we did was, we didn't give up.