Kendrick Lamar Quotes

But I never want to get to the point where I write a safe song or one that represents my sense of a subject in order to appear civilized.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.

I've always been the audience that I wanted to reach, so I write for myself.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

I feel like the point of being an artist is to have your own voice: to do it the way you would do it and not the way anyone else would do it. If you're a strong enough writer, then that voice is going to come out all the time, and I can't stop it from coming out, no matter what I do.

I feel like it's important, especially at young age, to find exactly what it is that makes your style so important as opposed to just trying to fit into the iconic styles of performers out there.

I want to make music that I like; not something that I have to make because I think it's going to sell.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

Whatever is about you that is translated into your art, that's gonna keep you completly original and fresh and I just think that, that's just the best advice I can give, to an artist creatively.

I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.

Rock is all about writing your own script; it's all about pioneering.

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

If you start to just aim for what the audience wants to hear, you're already hamstrung because you don't have any freedom.

If you're trying to please everyone, then you're not going to make anything that is honestly yours, I don't think, in the long run.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

I think the most important thing for an artist is to not worry about what anybody else thinks. You just have to do what comes from your heart and your being and put it out there-that's true in any of the arts.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'

Conforming is not cool.

A musician should only sound like what they do, and no two musicians sound the same. It's an individual-feel thing, you know?

You can't come out on a record dissing the system and be on a label that's connected to the system.

If you try to follow everyone else's mold, you'll probably fail at some point because God created us uniquely for a reason.

All the power to them but I'm not interested in making yet another show that looks like some other show.