When I started rhyming, my favorite rhythms were from John Coltrane and some of the things he did on sax. And certain rhythms that I hear on drums, I try to emulate with my words, dropping on the same patterns that them beats or them notes would hit.

Rakim

I got into DJing and making beats when I was about 17. I was always fascinated by the four elements of hip-hop: you know, writing, rhyming, breakdancing and graffiti.

Abbie Cornish

Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness.

Allan Gurganus

Hip-hop has survived as a sonic practice more than anything else. It's an approach to music-making based in sampling and rhyming over beats, that's proven far more versatile than its detractors thought it would.

Ann Powers

I just think that rap takes way more slack than the video games and the movies. We don't make guns. Smith and Wesson makes guns. Like, white people make guns and bullets, and all we're doing is rhyming and putting words together.

Cam'ron

My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.

China Mieville

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Christopher Marlowe

I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him.

Chuck Berry

I can remember the first time I ever recorded my vocals on to a beat. Cat Coore from Third World - a legendary Jamaican band - had a little demo set up at his house. I'm very good friends with his eldest son, Shiah, who plays with me now. So we were rhyming over a track by the dancehall artist Peter Metro. I've still got it somewhere.

Damian Marley

No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

Dorothy Fields

I was able to make up lots of portementos, literally hundreds and hundreds of words... See, I find that mine don't have any meanings. They're not proper. Although I've got a great dictionary of them. It's like the Cockney rhyming slang or something.

Elizabeth Fraser

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Gertrude Stein

When people ask me, 'When are you gonna stop rhyming?' I don't know when I'm gonna stop rhyming because we all got situations. Even when I get 50 or 60 years old, if God spares my life, if I got false teeth and I'm still rhyming, I have to rhyme about that.

Ghostface Killah

If you take a song like 'We Will, We Will Rock You,' 'You got blood on your face... ' - he's rhyming on that! And if you take the lyrics out of that song, you get a hip-hop beat. It's a rock song, though. So it's not out of my element for me to get with Black Lips.

Gza

The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere 'assonance' rather than that of actual rhyme.

H. P. Lovecraft

I'm a B-boy at heart. I still like rhyming. It's just the radio game is like Chinese arithmetic. It's hard to know what nuts to crack. But I still love music, been dropping music. Never stopped, really.

Ice Cube

I think, people look at me, and they say, 'You were very aggressive,' I say, 'Yeah,' you know, and I've made a better life for myself, for my son, so I should reflect that with my music now. I shouldn't still be rhyming like that; that would be me lying.

Ice T

A certain administration which I won't call by name took the arts out of the schools, and that left the brothers out on the street with nothing, so they went to the turntables and started rhyming. Then they had a way to express themselves, and that's the birth of hip-hop.

Isaac Hayes

I fell in love with rhyming when I turned 13. I was in junior high. I got into it, but I wasn't serious. It was just for fun.

Jay Rock

I started writing poetry when I was in the fifth grade, just rhyming in class.

Jay Rock

When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

Jerry Saltz