Kendrick Lamar Quotes

My goal is to play characters that I feel I can contribute to and also ones I can contribute back to my life.

Brooklyn is not the easiest place to grow up in, although I wouldn't change that experience for anything.

I was 19 when I recorded my first album, and I've been exposed to many things during these last few years; all the baby fat is gone.

I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.

I want to write more and direct more, but only so I can keep practising my craft and be involved in the projects that really interest me.

I could have continued to get into trouble, but I wanted to do something positive with myself - and music is the best way.

We've grown up with American movies. Not to say that American movies - or movies that have been based in Watts, Compton, or Inglewood - are a 100% true depiction of that world. But also you have inner-city London, and the foundations are pretty much the same. Especially me, growing up in Southeast London, in Peckham.

I think anything that affects me in my personal life is going to help me be a better artist on stage.

I spent a lot of time making music and touring around the country and living the weird life. I was just trying to keep a job and get by. So in a lot of ways, I went through a strange version of film school. So you live through a lot of things, and put them into your work.

I’ve aged, but I don’t think I’ve grown up.

I think you learn. You learn from your mistakes. You learn from things you do and try to stay away from the negatives in your life. I think I've grown.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.

Dare to be the adults we want our children to be.

When you grow up in that environment of drugs and guns and people gettin' hurt, it start to reflect your background. And I think, at that time when I was doin' it, that's all I knew. But as I got older in the business, I stopped bein' involved with that, and I started to look at the world. And I said, 'Yo, I wanna start talkin' about everything that goes on in the world. I don't wanna just limit myself to one style'.

Just because I was 30 doesn't mean I was grown. God, I was such an idiot. I was an absolute idiot at 30. And I grew up.

You know, growing up my - you know, I came from Compton, Calif., and, you know, it was a place where a lot of people did come out when a lot of people stayed. So I've been able to see the top and the bottom of life, and I think that balances you if you allow it to and if you remember where you came from.

The day you realize you're a grownup is the day you realize that you have to do something. When we're kids, we don't have to do anything. Then all of a sudden you realize, if I want this to be better, I've got to do something.

I'm growing older, but not up.

I talk about role models a lot and wanting to be a role model for kids around me because I didn't have that growing up.

A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.

....You should keep dental floss on you at all times; when your eyesight goes, quit driving; don't keep too many secrets, eventually they'll eat away at you. But the most valuable lesson he taught me was this: Every day we get older, and some of us get wiser, but there's no end to our evolution. We are all a mess of contradictions; some of our traits work for us, some against us. And this is what I figured out on my own: Over the course of a lifetime, people change, but not as much as you'd think. Nobody really grows up.

As you get older, your songwriting starts to become less and less about you, and especially when you have kids and a family. You start to see the world through other people's eyes a lot more to the point where it's hard to go back and relate to that "me against the world" perspective that I think a lot of my earlier songs were about. It's not so much about "me against the world," it's, how do you make the best possible future for your kids to grow up in?

Something awful happens to a person who grows up as a creative kid and suddenly finds no creative outlet as an adult.

As a kid I had dreams about being successful, thinking it would be cool. Then, when I was in my 20s, I really thought I had it much more figured out than I do now.