El-P Quotes

My films are a personal reflection on the impact that the state - the system and the world - has on me.

I'm not really sure what social message my art carries, if any. And I don't really want it to carry one. I'm not interested in the subject matter to try to teach society anything, or to try to better our world in any way.

I don't know if I would describe myself as a political artist.

'A Talk to Teachers' showed me that a teacher's work should reject the false pretense of being apolitical and, instead, confront the problems that shape our students' lives.

When I first started out, I thought it was enough to make an angry song that pointed out the problems of the world.

I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.

I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov.

Everything in life influences my music. I've always used songwriting as a means to share what I think is profound.

Inspiration for my music just comes from, you know, my life experiences.

Well, I wouldn't say that this experience had any influence on my decision to do this film about Andy, because Andy was apolitical. Andy was never political.

In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

It has always seemed slightly uncomfortable, the idea of politicised musicians. Very few of them are clever enough to do it; if they're good at the political side, the music side suffers, and vice versa.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I don't set out to write a political song. I am not one of those that feels compelled to write about what's going on.

I can only speak for myself and my own music, because that is what I am most familiar with, and I write about things that I am living or experiencing.

Well, a lot of people within government and big business are nervous of Hip Hop and Hip Hop artists, because they speak their minds. They talk about what they see and what they feel and what they know. They reflect what's around them.

I never wanted to be one of those actors with a political agenda.

I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

We didn't start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what's going on around us.

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.

For me, writing, drawing, and political activism are three separate pursuits; each has its own intensity. I happen to be especially attuned to and engaged with the society in which I live. Both my writing and my drawing are invariably mixed up with politics, whether I want them to be or not.

I do write songs with a political dimension to them sometimes, but I'm always slightly appalled by it when I do.

You can't do anything that's not political in this time and age.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.