Jay-Z Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

New York has a thousand universes in it that don't always connect but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don't.

Jay-Z
I'm not afraid of dying
I'm afraid of not trying.

Jay-Z
Now all the teachers couldn't reach me and my momma couldn't beat me Hard enough to match the pain of my pop not seein' me So with that disdain in my membrane Got on my pimp game, fuck the world, my defense came.

Jay-Z
Whoever said that artists shouldn't pay attention to their business was probably someone w/their hand in some artist's pocket.

Jay-Z
I'm from the school of the hard knocks,
We must not let outsiders violate our blocks, and my plot
Let's stick up the world and split it fifty-fifty
Let's take the dough and stay real jiggy.

Jay-Z
No matter where you go you are what you are player and you can try to change but that's just the top layer man you was who you was before you got here

Jay-Z
We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

Jay-Z
One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That's the American ideal. Poor people don't like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don't like to think of themselves as poor.

Jay-Z
On the night he died - he was twenty-seven - Basquiat had been planning to see a Run-DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he'd hit them with the same three words: "Royalty, heroism, and the streets.

Jay-Z
It's always been most important for me to figure out "my space" rather than trying to check out what everyone else is up to, minute by minute. Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself— and that's essential for any artist, I think.

Jay-Z
If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow.

Jay-Z
Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.

Jay-Z
The burden of poverty isn't just that you don't always have the things you need, it's the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you'd do anything to lift that burden.

Jay-Z
If skills sold, truth be told, I'd probably be
Lyrically, Talib Kweli
Truthfully, I wanna rhyme like Common Sense
But I did 5 mill' - I ain't been rhyming like Common since.

Jay-Z
You can want success all you want, but to get it, you can't falter. You can't slip. You can't sleep. One eye open, for real, and forever.

Jay-Z
And through our travels we get separated, never forget:
In order to survive, got to learn to live with regrets.

Jay-Z
In the end, you can't censor the truth, especially when it comes packaged in hot music.

Jay-Z
Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

Jay-Z
You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.

Jay-Z
I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell
I am a hustler, baby, I'll sell water to a well

Jay-Z
Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.

Jay-Z
We change people through conversation, not through censorship.

Jay-Z
Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.

Jay-Z
You can put a new shirt on your back, slide a fresh chain around your neck, and accumulate all the money and power in the world, but at the end of the day those are just layers. Money and power don't change you, they just further expose your true self.

Jay-Z
Only God can judge me so I'm gone, either love me or leave me alone.

Jay-Z
They say you can't turn a bad girl good
But once a good girl's gone bad, she's gone forever

Jay-Z
A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

Jay-Z
I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

Jay-Z