Talib Kweli Quotes

Emceeing has always been about making the most intellectual, most creative, wittiest rhyme as possible regardless of any subject. It was always about bringing the best out of yourself.

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

I still very much appreciate the storytelling of the best rappers.

If you want to relate me to the newer cats, let's go. Let's go line for line and bar for bar. If it's all about spitting and metaphors and MCing and lyrics and entendres, I will eat 99 percent of you dudes up.

Rap is only one end of a whole spectrum of verbal play and virtuosity. Rap is geared for aural pleasure.

I like lyrical rappers and turn up rappers.

I got a close friend who raps.

I used to print out lyrics from Nas songs and write my own lyrics in the same syllable count but with different words and different rhymes.

I liked Big L's wordplay with the multi-syllable rhymes he hit so clean.

When you get my 'Supreme Clientele,' it is straight bars.

I always wrote poems when I was a little girl, and I loved hip hop music, and I kind of just started writing poems over beats, and that's when I started rapping.

Rappers should sit down and construct quality lines.

To me, I'm on a whole different level of rapping.

I'm a real rapper.

I knew I could rap a little bit, which is not the most unique way for being funny. The more I did it, the better I got at rapping, and then I fell in love with the craft of it, and the possibility that I was a good rapper was very intriguing.

I think the best rappers practice concept albums in their work.

Biggie was to me the guy who was the best at painting the picture and making you visualize something, Pac was the best poet, and I feel like Jay Z is all of the above. Then Rick Ross is just, every line he spits is just perfect, and he's one of my favorite MCs of all time.

I want to be one of the most versatile rappers in the game.

I'm a different type of rapper. I work more than the average rapper.

Oh man, I think Damian Lillard makes good music. He has bars.

I'm not a mumble rapper.

I like smart rappers who aren't necessarily trying to be deeper than you, like Danny Brown.

That's something I can never lose: my love for the art of rap. As I grew older and became more interested in song writing, it just pushed my possibilities further. I always have to have a foot firmly on the floor as a rapper, because that's how I started.

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 don't want people to confuse me as an MC that talk about nothing.