Questlove Quotes

The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.

Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.

When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.

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.

Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.

Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.

Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.

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.

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.

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.

Just because the laws were changed doesn't mean that the attitudes have changed.

I've always been a lover of hoodies. I'm a guy that travels a lot. I'm a guy that spends a lot of time on a cold air-conditioned tour bus. I'm a guy that likes to watch movies in peace. I'm a guy that likes to travel in the airport in peace.

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.

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.

We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."

To be hip-hop is much more than just rapping in the production. It is more in the attitude.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All we sell is the Greatest feeling on Earth

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.

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.

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 feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.

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.

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.

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 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.

I've come to the conclusion that the average person can do about four things a day, like four real things a day.

It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing.

My parents were really strict about me not watching cartoons.

It's a funny word, persistence. It means not giving up, but it also means just passing on through time.

It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."

Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive.

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.

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.

In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.

After 2001, everyone in the Soulquarians blew up, which wasn't expected. We all got the success, and then everybody froze.

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.

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.

I cannot keep a girlfriend longer than seven months. I have 12 jobs. I don't have time for my personal life. I'm fully aware that this is the sacrifice.

I do count on a changing of tides. All too often, what could be a critics' darling today becomes tomorrow's target. I don't want to be too blasé about it.

At 25, my idea of success may have been more vain, like, "I'll be good the day that there's $20 million in my account and I have this particular house and the wife and 2.5 kids." But at 40 - and I know it's kind of silly telling you guys this - but as long as my Metacritic rating stays above 80, that's all I care about.

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.

There's no such thing as success on an isolated level.

I never want to get to that level of poverty where taking a bath has to be a hot-pot experience.

My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there's a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in black people. The best example is, Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hiphop.

I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic. And you know, I don't sit there, I don't bask in the awards I've won, you know, read my bank statements, I refuse. To me, that's how you start losing the hunger. So for me personally, I just don't celebrate it. I'm happy, right now.