Skepta Quotes

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

I grew up around New York, graffiti culture.

I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible.

I was bringing the whole music, hip-hop, art, break dancing and urban cultural thing to the downtown table.

Pop culture mirrors culture, and, I think, as a rapper, hip-hop in a lot of ways mirrors the things that are happening in urban neighborhoods.

I'll just walk around New York and watch people on the streets.

Oakland has always had artists attempting to define the immense beauty and ridiculousness around them.

When I got into graffiti, it was the most-exciting art form and it changed the course of my life.

Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.

Photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity.

I like shooting in New York because I have such a connection to the city. I have so many memories there.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

I started off as a graffiti artist in the South Bronx. My tag name was 'Loco' because I would go crazy and tag anywhere I wanted, in the weirdest places.

Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.

All I wanted was to connect my moods with those of Paris. Beauty paints and when it painted most, I shot.

My graffiti really comes more from a May '68, sort of Situationist vibe than the hip-hop world. I think a real graffiti artist would find me a poser.

I like to keep my feet on the sidewalk.

Graffiti has an interesting relationship to the broader world of hip-hop: It's part of the culture, but also in a weird way a stepchild of the culture.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

There's a lot about New York that is unique, and there's always a culture and a subculture going on everywhere.

I'm fascinated by the way Diane Arbus saw things. She came from this fashion background and then twisted it.

I'm interested in youth culture and popular culture.

The trains were the beating heart of the New York graffiti scene.

Graffiti's always been a temporary art form. You make your mark and then they scrub it off.