Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Questlove
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American musician Questlove.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
I've come to the conclusion that the average person can do about four things a day, like four real things a day.
Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.
Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.
You know the greatest thing about working on 'Fallon?' I get so many anonymous gifts.
I believe that the only people who really, truly benefit from any of the policies of Republicans are the wealthy. I'm in that 1 percent tax bracket, but I'm not a man of wealth.
I do secret stand-up shows around New York. I announce and tweet this to nobody - I get onstage and I do a quick five minutes.
I have a lot of those 'Forrest Gump,' I-was-there moments.
Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.
I want the 'Roots' biopic to be animated - I see Charles Schulz drawing us. I think it would be more hilarious with the voices of children.
I would love to have some sort of 'Back To The Future' Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid.
I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.
The president is just the coach of a football team. You need the right support, the right stadium, the right players, the right staff. An excellent coach is not going to win games.
I think the music comes first, then comes the fashion, and thus, the lifestyle. I believe it starts with music, and then the person delivering it delivers the lifestyle, the fashion. Madonna is a great example of that.
Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.
I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.
My parents were really strict about me not watching cartoons.
During the 2008 election, I made clear to the Obama campaign that I don't think it's wise for me to force my personal political agenda on anyone.
According to my parents, I just started drumming when I was two. I traveled with them from five to seven on the road, playing percussion. Between 8 and 12, my dad sort of prepared me by teaching me every aspect of road life.
In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.
I don't have friends, and it's hard for me to make new friends. Right now, the people that are in my life are the people that I work with.
In terms of being a 'sneakerhead,' there was one point where I was obsessively following every sneaker blog. That's the beauty of Twitter: To get the heads up on what's coming out.
My first gig was at Radio City Music Hall when I was 13.
I prefer to unwind by DJing. I learned that from Mike D from the Beastie Boys. After a show, he would DJ. Once I saw that, I wanted to do that. And now DJing is like my lifeline. I love the power it represents.
Highlight reels are about that one person. After a barrage of highlight reels, you get the sense that you can do it without a team. But music thrived the most when groups were involved. People lose sight of that - that community makes the world run.
Kurt Cobain represents a very legit, realistic outlook. Before that, in my head, to be a white artist was to be privileged.
I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.
I hate videos. I'm meticulous on everything from cover art, fonts, productions, mixing. But when it comes to videos, I just feel so defeated.
How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.
At the end of the day, I don't release any records that I'm not proud to put my name on. I never got to that point.
And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.
To be hip-hop is much more than just rapping in the production. It is more in the attitude.
All we sell is the Greatest feeling on Earth
Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.
Half the time, my job is basically to talk people off the ledge. It's more psychological than just me picking up some sticks and counting, "1, 2, 3, 4."
I don't think crack happened by accident. I'm part conspiracy theorist, because you can't develop something that dangerous and have it not be planned.
I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I'm not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there's a real answer. Maybe life's a circle.
It's a funny word, persistence. It means not giving up, but it also means just passing on through time.
I want to be as healthy as I can be so I can make it past 50; make it past 60 and make it past 70.
The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.
I hear a lot of cries of socialism and certainly real disguises of "Why should I share my money with these people?" We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."
We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."
Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.
Crack offered a lot of money to the inner-city youth who didn't go to college. Which enabled them to become businessmen. I know about maybe five people in the entertainment industry who did their peak work as a result of crack usage.
When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.
I don't believe in good music and bad music anymore. I'm through with that phase of my life. Sometimes I just wanna feel good, so I put on a good record. But mostly I'm more of a businessman than a music fan, so I'm listening to music in terms of, is this effective or not effective?
Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive.
Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.
Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.
The Chronic represented everything that I hated about hip-hop as a fan, but then later represented everything that I stood for as a musician and engineer.
I was one of those skeptics that thought that yoga was for kooks. Now I'm on a very strict regimen. You know, I work out. That's another thing I've learned relaxin', sleep, yoga. I didn't know that that's as crucial as going hard, as workin' hard, as exercising hard. I never knew. I thought that, "Okay, I gotta be at the gym like five hours everyday going balls to the wall." And what my yoga instructor, what my trainer, what they're trying to teach me is that, "No, it's sleep." That's important. That's just as important as workin' out.
Part of me would just like to relax and have one job that pays me the amount I need to survive. And another part of me wants the creativity that comes out of struggle and frustration and fear. It's a never-ending cycle, which must be how I want it, on some level.
I don't bask in the awards I've won, read my bank statements, I refuse. To me, that's how you start losing the hunger.
Switching off perfection switched on the human quality
My life's goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that.
I grew up in somewhat of a war zone in West Philadelphia in 1985, '86. It wasn't as extreme as someone coming in the classroom and just unloading on a class, but I knew to take the scenic route to go to the grocery store to avoid certain elements.
I really appreciate when people use their fame and their voice for more than just self-promotion, starting a dialogue about a topic or an issue much bigger than themselves.
Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.
There's no such thing as success on an isolated level.
You can't live off of just greasy fatty foods and stayin' up till six in the mornin' just partyin'. You gotta take care of yourself.
Just because the laws were changed doesn't mean that the attitudes have changed.
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