Langston Hughes Quotes

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

I know that I'm freer as a hip-hopper than as an executive. Even as a black man, I enjoy more freedom as a hip-hopper than as a black man. That, s controversial to say, but it's the truth.

I want to be my own artist and reflect my creativity.. I don't want to be turned into a pop princess; that's not who I am.

Comedy has allowed me to be my 100-percent-true self, as opposed to other places, where I feel like that's been a hindrance. Whether it's music or poetry or hosting, people want you to be something else: they want you to be packaged in a certain way.

I don't know, I really try not to pay attention to comparisons, 'cause I'm my own artist. I try to build my own sound.

We do things the way we do them and we do them unashamedly. It's our art. If you don't like it, that's fine. You don't have to.

You should do the sound that you want and not what others want.

To be honest, I'm selfish as an artist. I'm doing what I want to do and what I want to hear.

I have never followed anyone's style of singing.

It's funny: I rarely reference anything, and I'm one of those people that doesn't really spend much time in other people's worlds. I just try and create my own and make it as distinctive as I can.

Even I have certain depictions that I personally don't like, but I don't believe artists should necessarily follow a particular person's preference. They should focus on the things they like and follow their own desires.

The rule I stand by as an artist is definitely be yourself, and don't make music just for other people: make it for you first.

If you enjoy and become a fan of Tony Rock, I really appreciate it! But, I do my comedy for me, so I don't try and please everyone or appease anyone. In the end, it's for me.

I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.

My problem is not to reinforce or destroy any ideas anyone might have about me, how I do what I do, what my intentions are, the way that I do it. My only job as far as I can see is to do the music that I want to do. All those other things are completely out of my control.

Music, for me, is completely self-indulgent. I write it, I play the instruments, I arrange it, I produce it. It's all about me - as it should be.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us.

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

Basically I just had to say, 'Screw everyone around me - from now on I'm just gonna play what I think is important to me and our music.' So I gave the big finger to all the current trends in technical wizardry, and just went off and did what I felt was best for the songs.

I think it's really important to make things your own in your voice. I started when I was 23, and in the beginning of my career, there was this expectation of a young designer being edgier, cooler, more downtown. But I was never that person.

Be true. Be beautiful. Be free. In the midst of segregation and racism Mamma raised us to be independent and free. We saw ourselves as citizens of the world, not of a block.

I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.

Though it be a thrilling and marvellous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so - doubly dynamic - to be young, gifted and black.

To contest an author's right to create a poetic or realistic work is to want to force him to change his temperament, challenge his originality, refuse to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence nature has given him.

In all fields black consciousness seeks to talk to the black man in a language that is his own