Kanye West

It was a feeling I had. People were taught how to think, we’re taught how to feel. We don’t know how to think for ourselves, [and] we don’t know how to feel for ourselves. People say ‘Feel free,’ but they don’t really want us to feel free. I felt a freedom, first of all, doing something that everybody tells you not to do.

I believe ‘ye’ is the most commonly used word in the Bible, and in the Bible it means ‘you’.

I had plastic surgery because I was trying to look good for y’all.

I promise you, you’re going to see a new Ye. You’re going to feel the impact of the new relationships and the new ideas and the exposure that I’ve gathered. It’s about to be applied now.

I feel that [Trump] cares about the way black people feel about him, and he would like for black people to like him like they did when he was cool in the rap songs and all this.

When you want to express yourself, a lot of times words can get in the way.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

I like the music. I love it and live it in fact, but for me the business part just plain stinks.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.

You can’t copy anybody and end up with anything. If you copy, you’re working without any real feeling.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

It doesn’t have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I want to create music that’s therapeutic.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.