Dave East Quotes

I'm a believer in the ordinary person, that the ordinary person is just as important and has an equally unique perspective on the world as someone who is famous or perhaps more privileged.

When I started making music, I was so heavy into the hyphy movement. That's something you only know so much about if you were right there living in it, submerged in the culture.

It's a great story. It's available for anyone else who wants to try it. We're not brilliant. We're not unbelievable. We're just two people who hit a nerve. I think it can be done again and again and again. More people should try it.

You don't have to be rich and famous. You just have to be an ordinary person, doing extraordinary things. I'd like more people to know that it's there. Women's achievements still aren't recognised enough in many areas.

I've always been a massive fan of Batman. He didn't have any powers, so it meant that anyone could be Batman.

If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.

I want people to take pride in Spanish Harlem. These are people that everyone in the community could relate to... people who mean something special to us.

My dad grew up in Washington Heights. I grew up in New York in Manhattan. So we're purebred New Yorkers.

You know who we hear about all the rappers from? The bus drivers.

Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.

Hip-hop - it's the safari: it allows people who aren't under those circumstances to come closer to inner-city life, to explore it without actually being in danger. It's something kids in middle America indulge in to be rebellious.

I want the reader to be in the shoes of everyday people who are facing incredible dangers and wonder if they would make the same choices.

There are so many heroes just walking around in everyday life. It blows me away.

You seen my shows; I bring the 'hood out.

I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn't interest me. I'm not interested in psychotics. I'm interested in the person you don't expect to have a story. I like Everyman.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

There are so many men and women who hold no distinctive positions but whose contribution towards the development of society has been enormous.

L.A. is only where you live, because otherwise it's just a sprawling mass of everything, and I think if you live in L.A., you get a little network of places you go, and people you see, and when you leave town, you do miss those places and your friends.

Chicago is seriously my favorite city in the country. People have roots here, which is nice. When you go to Los Angeles, no one is actually from Los Angeles.

I don't come from a famous family and don't have this detachment from everyday people and everyday life. I'm just doing my job and the attention that comes with it is part of the territory.

Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary.

Right now, musically I'm inspired by everyday people.

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organized masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.

The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you.

Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are not superhuman. They are ordinary people with ordinary frailties. But therein lies the power of their example.