Quotes

I'll always be into sports. Sports is part of my life forever. My TV stays on ESPN all day long, I'm one of those. I don't even listen to music in the car; all I listen to is sports talk.

I like every girl. Every kind of girl that there is, I like.

New York was at the forefront of rap, so because of all the great people who have gone before me, being a rapper from Queens, I have to live up to those standards. I'm basically just a regular guy who says what he feels and likes to joke. I like long walks on the beach... and I love rap.

Whenever I cook, I think of Spanish music, so I always have to listen to some sort of salsa. It gets your body going.

My main influence is Kool G Rap and Cam'ron, pretty much. If you were to mix those two people up, I wish that would be me... This is my voice. I sound like nobody; I sound like me.

I love to cook a meal for the so-called holidays. You always need the turkey. I like making a good BBQ brisket as well.

You have to be talented. You have to work hard; you have to get the right pieces flowin' for you at the right time. And that's just what happened to me. I can't explain what happened.

I just do whatever I do, and put it out there without tryin' to cater to anybody. If you like it, you like it.

Everyone is trying to make these huge songs; I just make things that I want to listen to. Music that I will be comfortable listening to 10 years from now, that's my only thing.

Penmanship means a lot to me. I don't have cursive penmanship, though. I've created my own penmanship. It's very clear. Everyone can read it. I write things down all day long.

I don't ever have the pressure of making a hit, because I've never had a hit song, per se. The closest thing to a hit song was 'Shiraz,' and it's not your prototypical hit song, with a catchy hook and all this other stuff.

I have to be able to rap. I don't have the look. I don't have the typical slim-dude, fancy-clothes look. That's not me. I have to be able to rap - there is no other choice, or else I get eaten alive.

I'm gonna be honest. I don't care about much. I care about people liking my music. I made it very far without nothing being on radio.

I'm a man of different types of flavors and tastes. I like listening to things that inspire me. Older music, when instruments were being played, not just people hitting buttons. It's manlier. You're touching things to make sounds appear.

Billy Joel is an incredible musician. He just feels like one of the guys, you know. I grew up listening to his music.

You have to take control of your own life, your own destiny, and your own careers. You can't leave everything up to someone else, 'cause then you can look at them and blame them.

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.

Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.