Questlove Quotes

And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.

It's a funny word, persistence. It means not giving up, but it also means just passing on through time.

I never want to get to that level of poverty where taking a bath has to be a hot-pot experience.

Just because the laws were changed doesn't mean that the attitudes have changed.

I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.

Half the time, my job is basically to talk people off the ledge. It's more psychological than just me picking up some sticks and counting, "1, 2, 3, 4."

Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.

My life's goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that.

I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.

During the 2008 election, I made clear to the Obama campaign that I don't think it's wise for me to force my personal political agenda on anyone.

I prefer to unwind by DJing. I learned that from Mike D from the Beastie Boys. After a show, he would DJ. Once I saw that, I wanted to do that. And now DJing is like my lifeline. I love the power it represents.

You know the greatest thing about working on 'Fallon?' I get so many anonymous gifts.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.

Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive,

In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.

I've always been a lover of hoodies. I'm a guy that travels a lot. I'm a guy that spends a lot of time on a cold air-conditioned tour bus. I'm a guy that likes to watch movies in peace. I'm a guy that likes to travel in the airport in peace.

I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.

I don't have friends, and it's hard for me to make new friends. Right now, the people that are in my life are the people that I work with.

I hate videos. I'm meticulous on everything from cover art, fonts, productions, mixing. But when it comes to videos, I just feel so defeated.

Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.

To be hip-hop is much more than just rapping in the production. It is more in the attitude.

I don't believe in good music and bad music anymore. I'm through with that phase of my life. Sometimes I just wanna feel good, so I put on a good record. But mostly I'm more of a businessman than a music fan, so I'm listening to music in terms of, is this effective or not effective?

In terms of being a 'sneakerhead,' there was one point where I was obsessively following every sneaker blog. That's the beauty of Twitter: To get the heads up on what's coming out.

For anyone that's ever had a musical breakthrough in their career, it's always followed by the departure period right after.

You can't live off of just greasy fatty foods and stayin' up till six in the mornin' just partyin'. You gotta take care of yourself.

Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.

I hate holidays because it's the quietest; it's the most deafening sound in my apartment.

I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I'm not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there's a real answer. Maybe life's a circle ...

Crack offered a lot of money to the inner-city youth who didn't go to college. Which enabled them to become businessmen. I know about maybe five people in the entertainment industry who did their peak work as a result of crack usage.

I cannot keep a girlfriend longer than seven months. I have 12 jobs. I don't have time for my personal life. I'm fully aware that this is the sacrifice.

I really appreciate when people use their fame and their voice for more than just self-promotion, starting a dialogue about a topic or an issue much bigger than themselves.

Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.

My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there's a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in black people. The best example is, Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hiphop.

I was born at a very crucial time. I consider 1968 to be the Mason Dixon line between pre- and post-civil rights generation ideas, whereas a lot of people born before '68 they kind of went into that Moses mentality. Like, I'm not going to make it, you know, I don't have any hope.

All we sell is the Greatest feeling on Earth

I do secret stand-up shows around New York. I announce and tweet this to nobody - I get onstage and I do a quick five minutes.

It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."

I believe that the only people who really, truly benefit from any of the policies of Republicans are the wealthy. I'm in that 1 percent tax bracket, but I'm not a man of wealth.

Working with the artist elite can be like banging your head against the wall.

There's no such thing as success on an isolated level.

I don't bask in the awards I've won, read my bank statements, I refuse. To me, that's how you start losing the hunger.

I was one of those skeptics that thought that yoga was for kooks. Now I'm on a very strict regimen. You know, I work out. That's another thing I've learned relaxin', sleep, yoga. I didn't know that that's as crucial as going hard, as workin' hard, as exercising hard. I never knew. I thought that, "Okay, I gotta be at the gym like five hours everyday going balls to the wall." And what my yoga instructor, what my trainer, what they're trying to teach me is that, "No, it's sleep." That's important. That's just as important as workin' out.