Nas Quotes

As long as there's a demand for gangsta rap, it will be supplied.

I think that hip-hop is more of an individual effort. That means you're an artist from the streets, they expect you to rap about the streets, because that's what happens there.

Niggas is decaf, I stick 'em for the C.R.E.A.M.

The hip-hop community is made up of a lot of hustlers. Everybody is trying to get theirs, and everybody is trying to eat.

Back in the day, if someone said that hip hop and rap was a fad, that was a joke to me because they just didn't know what they were talking about. In reality, there were so many people who didn't know what they were talking about it.

My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was 'coded': it was called 'Reasonable Doubt.' So the things I was talking about... I was talking about in slang, and it was something that people in the music business was not really privy to. They didn't understand totally what I was saying or what I was talking about.

Mobb Deep is a street-rap group. We from off the streets.

It might take a while but I think the rap game is the people that can do it. We're all role models more than athletes because athletes don't wear clothes like the kid in the hood and they don't walk and talk like the kids in the hood. We're closer to them than anybody because they can look at us and see them.

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.

Rap is the new rock 'n' roll. We the real rock stars, and I'm the biggest of all of them. I'm the No. 1 rock star on the planet.

For a long time I heard rap without paying attention, but it is still a way of life, even when you're a kid.

A trap lord is basically the lord of the trap, and my trap is rap.

Before rap came along, I was, actually, actively in the streets; getting in trouble, doing the wrong thing.

Everything I do is going to be gangsta rap, street based, street oriented... I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level.

Somehow the rap game remind me of the crack game

The rap game has to save itself. Everybody's saving it. People like Lil Wayne is saving it. He's bringing energy to it.

This is the industry that wants [music], the rap industry.

Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.

I rap for listeners, blunt heads, fly ladies and prisoners

Hip-hop culture is deeply rooted in the wrong things. Hip-hop is about drugs right now. It's more so about drugs - about selling drugs, about using drugs - it's bad for kids.