Rza Quotes

I rap when I'm rich. I rap when I'm broke. I rap when I'm bullshit in the street. I rap about only having one woman now. If you can look at a continuum of my career, it's been an evolution of a real dude. So when I say I take my wife to the strip club, we're there, at the five-dollar joint. More than anything, I want people to take away that I'm not mainstream act.

The fundamentals of hip-hop still play an important role, cause it's about those similes, those metaphors, those parallels. And to some people it's just about, "Man, I'm really relating to the lifestyle."

Nas is one of my favorite rappers because you don't get any of that flashy stuntin'; you get the real, just raw bars. The way he tells stories and his vibe, I think we would make great music together.

I listened to a lot of Jay Z and Nas, stuff like that, so I was always New York-influenced. I think I have that New York flow.

I got no problem with Nas.

I'm not a pop rapper. That's nothing against pop music - I love pop music. I've jumped on pop records for people and still will, but I'm not a pop artist. I didn't start from there. I started in underground music. I consider myself an underground artist, as well as a producer.

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

It ain't this big I, little You. Music is to be shared. Music is not a hustle. [Hip hop's become] cultural stripmining [by the major labels]. Some people get into this music to make a killing but music is a way to make a living.

People need to understand that hip-hop that has gun talk is just for entertainment; similar to if you were watching a movie.

I don't love all hip-hop, but I do relate to stuff like early Nas, 2Pac, Biggie, and MF Doom because they're also trying to escape a scenario.

You have to have a balance, and I think that people get upset about Hip-Hop and say that it's dead because there is no balance. It's just all this simple-minded music, and it doesn't seem to be any content, and the dance club music outnumbers the little content there is.

Hip-hop has done more damage to black and brown people than racism in the last 10 years.

Underground hip-hop is, like, one of my foundations, I would say a cornerstone of my foundation of my musical tastes.

In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting.

Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.

I know people who are both extremely wealthy, people who are middle class and people with little material wealth. Whatever their circumstance may be, they are every bit as renounced as monks because they have that spirit. The spirit of charity on a spiritual platform. The Bhagavad Gita explains that real wisdom is when we see every living being with equal vision. When we love God, we naturally love our neighbor as our self, as the Bible also tells us.

I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation. There isn't much improvisation in film - there's virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don't necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it's much broader on a stage. But in a movie, it has to be real, and the characters have to look entirely real because it's being done as a faux documentary, so there are even fewer actors that can do that on film.

We don't measure our people's success in how they're doing in government. We measure how they are doing in the real world and the private sector economy.

We [Panthers] have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppresed people in the society.

People have notions of what a wife's role should be in this process, and it's been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different - I think most real marriages are.

It took me a while to figure it out, but to have a real hit on Broadway, you have to get the respected Broadway people to like it. But then the production also has to appeal to the most middle-class people who know nothing about Broadway and who come to see it later.

We did casting in L.A. and a lot of people came against the advice of their agents. The agents said, "You shouldn't be in Postal, it will damage your career." So Zack Ward came to casting and played one of the cop parts, and then later I looked at the DVDs again and said, "This guy is Postal Dude." He's like white trailer trash. He's had a long time in the film industry, but no real success. He needs money; he's two-times divorced in real life. He said he works only to pay off his Philippine ex-wife.

I want people to know that I'm a real person, and that I've been through normal situations, like crushes and heartbreaks.

It does not bother me that some say I'm dull and boring because the people that do know me will tell you a different story. It is very difficult to be open with people you don't know. There is nothing I can do about the fact that the real me does not get across and it is probably difficult to know the real me.

I don't go to scary movies. I don't like the experience of being scared. I think it's very weird that some people do. Obviously, humans are the only animals that do that. You don't see a wolf walk to the end of a cliff and look over the edge to freak himself out.