Freddie Gibbs Quotes

Sometimes you almost have to laugh to keep from crying to deal with the pain associated with the 'hood.

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

I was in the heart and soul of Baltimore. I definitely felt a connection to the people. They're really hard-working people that want to have a better life. And I saw the struggle that exists there.

I love rap because it talks about pain that comes authentically from the ghetto. It moves me.

If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.

It's always a struggle growing up in Akron.

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.

When I did 'Boyz N The Hood', I never thought how we grew up in South Central was interesting enough for a movie.

In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

What I find curious is that I ever became a writer at all. I grew up in the South Bronx, the land of poverty and petty hoodlums.

I didn't have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things that 'Super Fly' is about. It was easier than most scripts because it was about an environment that I knew.

I started writing because I saw such a huge lack of complex stories about the inner city.

'Slumdog Millionaire' is a fairy tale, but it starts in a place you really believe, and that came from spending two months wandering around the slums picking up stories and talking to people.

For me, basketball was always about survival because I was just trying to get out the hood, right? When I got to Chicago, I'm like, 'I'm just trying to survive, and anybody I got to step on or break, so be it.'

More people should rap about reality.

I'm going to make my own 'Trapped In The Closet' one day, about a black kid growing up in the hood.

We really just live our life. We rap about our life, where we from, our city, what we've been through, from the streets to losing people to being in prison. Everything you hear is reality for us.

The first rule of hip-hop is probably keep it real. And that can mean a lot of different things, but that's certainly important in reporting and storytelling.

I'm from Queensbridge. It's the largest housing project in New York. And growing up in Queens, it was different because I wasn't really experienced in traveling to the City. I never really got used to the City.

A lot of times, people won't be 100 percent real with their story, and I wanted to give people the drawn-out experience of the perseverance and the struggle that it took to get here.

I think my genre is more 'reality rap'; I talk about my life and the struggles that I've been through.

When people hear my music, they ain't really hearing about no shiny stuff, the glamorous life. They're going to hear that gritty, slum.

Mobb Deep's music, we represent poverty. That's what made us. That's who made us. That's who brought us up.

The way that UCB taught us to improvise, you always start from an inspiration from your life, something that's happened to you or a friend. And then you put a comic game onto it. It always starts from a place of reality, of truth.