In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.
Why should I worry, why should I care? And even when I cross that line, I got street savoire faire.
Yet, as only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night.
When you come out the streets. I ain't braggin'. I never sold drugs but I kept a joint on me. I got arrested plenty of times back when I was a juvenile. Not saying I was a bad ass. I was a juvenile coming' out to the city, to do MC conventions that Mike & Dave was doing. I had to hold myself down. Now I put the gat up. I chill. I pay more attention to life.
At heart, I'm a dude from South Central Los Angeles. We roll the way we roll because we had survival tactics; we had to learn how to adapt. That's just me.
I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but I lived in Brooklyn for a while as a kid. I went to junior high school there. Girls in Brooklyn have to be tough - I mean real tough - just to get by. It's life in the combat zone.
I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.
Mumbai is the kind of place where you learn how to be street smart... unless you're way too overprotected.
Rappers are usually rapping about knowledge they think people need to get by in the world. If there's no movement that gives the idea that the knowledge people need is how to take over the system, what they see is that people need to know how to hustle; people need to know how to survive.
Growing up in New York is like living in a horror museum because there are so many strange people walking the streets and riding the subways. You learn to develop a tough front if you live here, just in case you get into any kind of trouble and you need to talk your way out of it.
You can survive in New York without much, if you're careful. You have to make your own food at home, and don't buy a lot of clothes.
My image of what a city should be - the super-rich and all the poor and desperate and the people who have some kind of a desire. It's a surviving game, people trying to survive on many different levels.
It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.
A city is a crazy concrete jungle whose people at the end of each day somehow make a small step ahead against terrible odds.
Homeless people's dogs are more knowledgeable than dogs in Beverly Hills. Why? Because they explore, they move forward, they go through the ups and downs in life. A dog in a wealthy environment, there is no downs except what he lives.
I'm sharp... What the street taught me how to do is how to hustle. How to make something out of nothing.
...although I had to admit a certain affection for the Mattel booth advertising Urban Survival Barbie, now with her own Machete and blood testing unit.
Anyone who lives in N.Y.C. will tell you that getting into a confrontation on a city street is a complete nightmare 100 percent of the time.
I was a full-blown street cat. I was trying to hustle my way. I thought I was going to hustle my way to a mansion or something. I was doing pretty good, but I didn't realize that there was no way to win that game.
I have the street smarts and survival skills of, like, a poodle.
Cockneys make good beggars. They are held in high esteem by the fraternity in America. Their resource, originality and invention, and a never-faltering tongue enable them to often attain their ends where others fail, and they succeed where the natives starve.
I was 14, and I left on my own. Living in a subway train, and police used to come in with a nightstick and say, 'You can't sleep here.' I'd get up and go across the street, get on another train, and go back the other way.
In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Urban survival rule 22: Never annoy an armed man.
Gangbanging is a survival instinct, regardless of how anybody tries to paint it.
