Kendrick Lamar Quotes

At first you're doing it for yourself, it's about what sounds good to you. It's about expressing yourself. Then you get comfortable as an artist and you find yourself and people get familiar.

I'm now able to show who I am as an artist.

I think I've been a bit misunderstood; the first record was more timid than I wanted it to be. I don't like getting pinned down by sex or how I sound like because it's not who I am or what I want to be.

I've really come into my own as an artist. I'm much more sure of my identity and understand it much better, and have accepted the fact that I like to jump around a lot in terms of who I am and what kind of music I create, and that it is okay - in fact, that is my main identity, the fact that I do that.

He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise.

What I particularly liked was that, coming from California and not being involved in the New York scene, I developed my personal way, in my own way, at my own pace.

I loved the Brazilian music I played. But this is finally me. For the first time I think it's really me.

The first album was a very successful record. It made me very visible and it's an immediate association, but I don't do that anymore. Now I'm true to myself as an artist again. I'm more vocally oriented.

The only thing I want to be defined by is my music and personality.

I definitely still like writing one-liners, but I also think that I've changed a lot in that I've allowed myself freedom to grow.

Create something for yourself that you feel proud of, that you are in control of, that gives you a better understanding of the type of artist you want to be.

Social media has changed my life, and it taught me that you can make your own path and really find who you are as an artist, in whatever capacity.

I didn't have time to be anybody's muse; I was too busy rebelling against my parents and learning to be an artist.

When I was starting out with record companies, there was a tendency to simplify the image as a prodigy. I have more than one adjective, and I've always tried to be myself and listen to my instincts.

At WSX I think I was very much trying to figure it out on my own and we were creating our own style and our own thing. I can only speak for myself, I was not trying to be anything. I was not trying to be like anyone else.

Every now and then, as a composer and producer, it's important to write music for yourself.

I'd been so heavily influenced by Em, but artists that don't grow out of that don't go anywhere. Ultimately, I came to understand that what Eminem stood for above all else was 'be yourself.'

I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat.

When you're young and starting out, a lot of artists think they know exactly who they are. There are others who come out in someone else's skin. They learn to take it off bit-by-bit and work out the core of what they're trying to say.

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

There are obviously so many artists that are very inspiring, but I can't say that they like - that I have someone in mind that is like a creative direction of where I want to go as an artist. I think I'm just doing my own thing.

I used to have to downplay my sexuality because I wanted to be taken so seriously as a thespian and as an artist and as an actor, so I'd play crack heads and down trotting women and disguise myself, and I think as I've gotten older, I become more comfortable with who I really am and all parts of me knowing that my physical self doesn't diminish me in any way or my talent.

You are the artist and the art.

I think perhaps I've learned to be myself. I have a theory that all artists who would be important - painters and writers - must learn to be themselves. It takes a very long time.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.