Everything I do is me. I don't like taking ideas from people unless they're the G.O.A.T.
A Boogie wit da Hoodien
I used to record songs, like, play the beat from one phone and have another phone recording me and just rap. Moving from that to a studio was like, 'Damn, I never knew I could sound like this.' It was just magic.
New York sounds like something that I could really listen to. It's like a vibe; it's a hit song. It's a song that you could listen to in five years and still like.
You can't say I don't sound like a N.Y. rapper - it's because I don't wanna sound like nobody else.
This is the most fun thing in the world to me, making music. Sitting down, I can make songs and not leave the booth, ever, and I love it.
I started off throwing out 'Artist.' I made that my first mixtape. Then, I threw out 'TBA,' which means 'To Be Announced.'
I found my sound through exploring. I was in the studio yelling, going low, trying things, and that's how I found that I have a lot of sounds.
I had to realize that you can't try to get money, support yourself, and grind doing whatchu need to do at the same time. The music is the grind. You really gotta grind. You gotta find your way around. You can't be stuck tryna get there.
Mr. Obama is the only popular politician left in the world. He would win an election in any one of the G-20 countries, and his fellow world leaders will do anything to take home a touch of that reflected popularity.
A. A. Gill
The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism.
Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.
When I joined the Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they all had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, they were all bright as new pins.
Money has to be an explosion of excitement and opportunity, yet we already secretly know that it doesn't do what it promises. Nothing has ever given us as much pleasure as our pocket money when we were 12, or our first wage at the end of that first exhausting week, paid in folded cash.
The trouble with righting some wrongs is that it makes the remaining ones seem even more unbearable.
Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.
Suits are malevolent magicians' sleeves for socialists, full of patrician loops and tricks, small, embroidered, cryptic messages of deference and privilege. They are ever the uniform of the enemy. They are also the greatest British invention ever.
When you look at traditions closely, examine what they really are, you realize they're made up of layers and layers of deferrals, delays, indecisions, tomorrows and long lunches.
I'm too vain to go on TV. I'd be a monster of self-consciousness. Plus, I've got a ridiculous voice - I sound like a camp friend of Bertie Wooster's.
Cowboy boots you can't wear unless you actually are a cowboy or in a Status Quo tribute band, or over 60; there's something about a retiring gent in cowboy boots that looks sort of presidential.
It's not in the nature of stoic Cincinnatians to boast, which is fortunate, really, for they have meager pickings to boast about.
The truth is a mayor can actually do very little to alter the course of a huge city run by the free market that is home to banking - the engine room of capitalism.
The pleasure in lovers' gifts is that they are often covert and secretive, worn next to the skin, hidden under pillows.
The part that makes you unique is the bit people will like or fear, fall in love with, or try to avoid.
All people from small islands dance funny.
Everyone has to go to a funeral at some time and you need to be dark and sombre, and in a black tie.
Learning Jimmy Carr riffs off by heart is not the way to anyone's heart, unless you're Jimmy Carr. And remember, the two most attractive things in a man is a sense of danger and being able to make a girl feel really safe.
Being able to afford everything you desire is not, by any means, the worst thing that can happen to you. But, depressingly, and more profoundly, neither is it the best.
Every man imagines that he will turn his suit like a double agent, that it can be twisted to his will with irony or comedy, that the man can undermine its origins.
Nature gave you your look and there's only a limited amount you can do about that, but what you wear is the skin you choose for yourself.
Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else - university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.
As handbags get ever more absurdly large, so they need to carry more stuff to validate the expense of this huge trunk with chains, buckles and padlocks on.
I generally only eat one meal a day, which is pretty unusual for a restaurant reviewer. It's not that I have a problem with food; I'll eat anything that doesn't involve a bet, a dare, or an initiation ceremony.
Women's handbags are incredibly heavy. You rarely get to pick one up and, when you do, you wonder why anyone carries so much stuff around all day.
If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn't suffer fools gladly.
I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.
I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for himself first.
War is something of man's own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the thing you can't hear, and not bothering.
To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.
It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words, like 'What about lunch?'
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.
The weapon of suicide bombing is so desperate that you aren't even left with the possibility of taking revenge or punishing anyone; the terrorist is killed along with his victims, his blood mixing with theirs.
Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries.
And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so.
Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.
The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.
I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently - his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics but poetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation.
We're living with the Arabs; we have to understand them... Through knowing the Arabs, you know yourself better.
I come from two parts of the oriental community - Jerusalemite and North African Jews.
