Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter) Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting.
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If you think about it, you can have the best CGI, but you can always tell that it is CGI. Your brain can spot that is not real even though you think it looks cool. Your brain knows the truth, so you don't jump and you don't scream. It was very important for me to expose the audience to real elements.
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Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.
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There's so many confusing messages that you're being sent about being pretty but not too pretty, smart but not too smart, ambitious but in a way that makes people comfortable. It's very hard to navigate.
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I don't care whether people like me or dislike me. I'm not on earth to win a popularity contest. I'm here to be the best human being I possibly can be.
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My house looks like it was decorated by a 14-year old with a platinum American Express card.
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I breathe martial arts every day of my life.
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It's like a bird. If he knew what he was doing, he would fall.
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I was initially very interested in public policy, but then after my masters at Harvard, I felt that it was important to get a better handle on the economics of it as well. I did my Ph.D. in macroeconomics, and my thesis - 'Why Is It That Some Countries Save And Others Not?' - was on savings.
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I'll hear people say every so often that having HIV must not be so bad - 'Just look at Magic and how well he's doing.'
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The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion - it's reality.
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We only have a certain amount of energy for each day. If we use it for the wrong purpose, if we focus on the negative or dwell on whoever hurt us, then we're not going to have the energy we need for the right purposes.
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My role models were always the Pacinos and the Oldmans, the guys who get dirty with their characters, and I arrived in L.A. during the big boom of 'Dawson's Creek.' I was getting cast as the boy next door, or the friend of the jock. I thought, 'Did I really have to do all that studying?'
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If you can slow the biological process of aging, even a minor slowdown in the rate at which we age yields improvements in virtually every condition of frailty and disability and mortality that we see at later ages.
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'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.
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Jerusalem is united, will never be divided again.
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Music is universal too. Even deaf people like to dance, love rhythm, and can kind of pick it up.
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The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
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If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
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Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.
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I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
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What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for art's sake' than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.
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For someone whose goal in life was to stay unemployed, I can't imagine what I thought was going to happen. I was so terrified of everything, I just thought I'd curl up in the gutter and die, and by a complete mistake, my life turned out to be absolutely wonderful.
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The average rap life is two or three albums. You're lucky to get to your second album in rap!
