will.i.am Quotes

I'm trying to escape the shackles of a pen and a pad. I've sat in sessions with Jay-Z where he doesn't write anything down. He'll come up with the most incredible triple entendre, all in his head - it's amazing.

When I was coming up, a freestyle wasn't a freestyle unless everything was completely improvised, in-the-moment and right there, and you had to incorporate various elements of what was going on in the room on the day.

I am my own parent when it comes to rapping and do impromptu stuff. Being a rapper, you have to be good at improvising, like you give me a word and I have to rhyme it quickly and then make sense out of the rhyme.

I freestyle everything.

I still to this day get the most inspiration from rap lyrics.

I freestyle, but I'd rather sit down and write down my music to map out what I'm doing. But if I'm out with my friends, I will freestyle, you know?

I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.

If you're really a rapper, you can't stop rapping.

I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

Rap is something you can just throw on the skillet and fry up real quick. That's how it comes to me, my train of thought. It's like getting dressed - I don't have to sit down and stare at clothes, I just pick what I like and put it on. But rock, you gotta put it in the oven and let it bake.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Writing lyrics is part spontaneous, intuitive and part really thought through and carefully analyzed as you write it. It's a mixture of two approaches, and I imagine writing anything is like that, really. Some of it just flows, and you just go with it.

I don't really write any of my raps down. The same, Kanye don't write any of his raps down. Common. It's easy that way. For me, personally, I figure I will lose some of the inspiration in the time of me writing it down, or I'll say it a certain way because I wrote it a certain way.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

Rapping was something I always wanted to do, so after school, my friends and I would catch the bus to my house and just sit there writing songs, every day.

No one will ever be able to come against me on the beats.

If you just freestyle, everybody is gonna go, 'Freestyle.'

Longevity always come from lyricism. From the people who can actually rap.

I used to do three or four songs a day, just write them - boom, boom, boom, and done - because of how spontaneous I was.

When you rap, you're using all of yourself.

To me, rapping is an art.

When I was in fourth grade, I started writing a lot of poetry, and eventually, someone in the church was like, 'You should switch this over to rapping.' I went home and did that - started putting my poems over rap.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.