Everything Quotes

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

I might talk about killing people, but that doesn't mean I do it.

You know, not to sound corny or nuthin', but I felt like a fighter comin' up, man. I felt like, you know, I'm being attacked for this reason or that reason, and I gotta fight my way through this.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I'm going through or what's going on in my life at that moment.

Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

Now that I understand that I'm an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer's block... Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can't get it out, I start feeling bad about myself - a lot of self-loathing.

When Bugs Bunny walks into rehab, people are going to turn and look. People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn't concentrate on my problem.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever. I'm not really book-smart.

It feels good to have your work respected again.

I stopped watching TV because of 'The Wire.' Like, 'The Wire' ruined everything for me because I don't even want to watch anything else now.

I don't know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.

The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can't really explain - let's just say it's all I can really do while I'm doing it.

Sometimes I feel like rap music is almost the key to stopping racism.

Rap was my drug.

I don't even know how to speak up for myself, because I don't really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice. And if you're always the new kid, you never get a chance to adapt, so your confidence is just zilch.

Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can't get it out, I start feeling bad about myself - a lot of self-loathing.

A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I'm learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, 'I can't go to Kmart. I can't take my kids to the haunted house.'

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know I've written a whole song in an hour.

I'm very much a creature of habit.

Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you're always going to find a hip-hop tape; that's all I buy, that's all I live, that's all I listen to, that's all I love.

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.

If there's not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it's like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can't really speak on it, because I wasn't there. I don't feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

I've accomplished enough with the music that I haven't had to go out there and do other things to over-saturate.

Before I was famous, when I was just working in Gilbert's Lodge, everything was moving in slow motion.

I didn't have nothin' going for me... school, home... until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

Never wound a snake; kill it.

Lord, I'm going to hold steady on to You and You've got to see me through.

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.

I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.

I've heard 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' read, and I tell you Mrs. Stowe's pen hasn't begun to paint what slavery is as I have seen it at the far South. I've seen de real thing, and I don't want to see it on no stage or in no theater.

I think there's many a slaveholder'll get to Heaven. They don't know better. They acts up to the light they have.

I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang - one of them left two children. We were always uneasy.

Most of those coming from the mainland are very destitute, almost naked. I am trying to find places for those able to work, and provide for them as best I can, so as to lighten the burden on the Government as much as possible, while at the same time they learn to respect themselves by earning their own living.

I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.

Twasn't me, 'twas the Lord! I always told Him, 'I trust to you. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I expect You to lead me,' an' He always did.

You'll be free or die!

In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them no-how. I always fell before I got to the line.

I never had anything good, no sweet, no sugar; and that sugar, right by me, did look so nice, and my mistress's back was turned to me while she was fighting with her husband, so I just put my fingers in the sugar bowl to take one lump, and maybe she heard me, for she turned and saw me. The next minute, she had the rawhide down.

Quakers almost as good as colored. They call themselves friends and you can trust them every time.

I said to de Lord, 'I'm goin' to hold steady on to you, an' I know you'll see me through.'

Why, der language down dar in de far South is jus' as different from ours in Maryland, as you can think. Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an' I could not understand 'dem, no how.

I would fight for my liberty so long as my strength lasted, and if the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.

I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came up like gold through the trees, and I felt like I was in heaven.

Now I've been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is. I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave.

I grew up like a neglected weed - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.