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
Why do you think my name is Artist? I'm an artist.
If you listen to me, it's real stories. It's catchy and something you can relate to.
Me and Thugger could make nine songs in a day and then choose which songs we like the most and think is gonna do something. With other people, it's like, we pick one song, and we hope it's the one.
I always looked up to people who did more than just rap or focus on music. I'm inspired by the people who put their different talents to use and turned it into something bigger.
Hip-hop originated from the Bronx specifically; that means everything. I'm down the block from where hip-hop was born and raised, so I'm glad I am here and I'm able to represent New York the way I am.
Most of the time, I'm making music. There'll be moments of my life where I feel like I gotta to take a break and come back to the music. It's hard to explain, but you need to get a break from it and then come back to it. It's like you gotta lose something to appreciate it.
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.
I never knew Artist was going to get this big. When I was making it, I put my all into it. But you never know what's going to happen with something you make.
I was trying to make my name just Artist in the beginning, but it was weird at first, because I wasn't an R&B singer or nothing. Not an R&B singer. I didn't do no melodic songs, none of that yet.
You always gonna feel me. That's my main thing. When I'm speaking in my music, you gotta feel me.
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.
Even though I can't dance, that's, like, the one thing I wished I could do growing up. I used act like I was MJ, doing the moonwalk, tip toes, leg kick, all that.
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.
There are five great ages of man - five moments when you need to reevaluate everything, clear out the cupboard and the wardrobe, and most importantly, your head. They are 13, 20, 30, 40 and 60. All men need to know this.
A. A. Gill
Boredom is not a thing. It's not a feeling or a condition. It is the absence of feelings, things and conditions.
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.
I don't remember ever stealing things, but I suppose I was endlessly borrowing money off people.
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.
If you're bored, it's because someone else is fulfilling his dream. Become a bore. It's the most interesting thing you'll ever do.
It is impossible to be taken seriously in shorts. No one has ever cared about anything said by a man in shorts.
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.
When Americans come to London they usually say how much they love the history, the tradition, the splendid tumpty-tum of things whose very repetition has become their point.
Texting isn't writing. It's not like letter writing. Texting is short scriptwriting. It's a collaborative soap opera where nothing happens.
The one thing politicians will always vote for is more politics, so in 2000 they invented the post of mayor of London without ever really thinking what it was a mayor would do.
Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.
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.
Shorts are silly. Men in shorts are silly men. And silly is the very worst thing a man can be.
No 13-year-old or over should ever be seen in trousers that finish above the ankle. It doesn't matter how good your legs are, or if you're on a beach in Bermuda where they invented the things.
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.
I've often been accused of dressing too well. I've always been fascinated by fashion, though I don't think I'm particularly fashionable.
Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.
Men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy.
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.
Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up.
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the thing you can't hear, and not bothering.
Some people care too much. I think it's called love.
War is something of man's own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.
A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.
No sensible author wants anything but praise.
Jews outside Israel live in permanent contradiction. I think they should come home.
I think about the Arabs not as enemies but as cousins. Even when we are in a fierce conflict with them, they are more of a kind of family - with all the problems of a family. We have to live with them.
World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.
So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.
I admit I think it is immoral for Jews to live in the Diaspora.
We have to rethink the two-state solution.
I enjoy doing my work, and I don't want to deal with the other things. When you enjoy doing your work so much, why deal with where to show, how to show, what to do? If the artist finds the right gallery which respects their work and gives them that freedom to do whatever they want to do, the artist can focus on his work.
