Top 290 Rapper Quotes

In the beginning, I was a stay-at-home dad. So I could actually focus on being a rapper. I could write. I could come up with ideas.

I don’t mind being called a weirdo. There are a lot of people in hip-hop who are probably never going to get what I do. But, by just being myself, I end up touching a lot more people who might never have paid much attention to a female rapper.

‘Rapper’s Delight’ was done in 17 minutes. Just one take, no mistakes, and it went to press from there. The record went platinum in 8 days.

I was a rapper. The reason I stopped rapping was because I realized that people wanted guys like Puff Daddy. That’s not what I do. I quit. That was it. I had to sacrifice for my choice. I said, ‘Forget it. I’ll be a producer.’ Nobody was going to make me do anything.

People always put you in a box as a rapper, especially when I get up on a panel and start speaking, and I start speaking when I got some sense. They’re like, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t expect him to have sense.’

The ability to make somebody feel something: that’s art. However you look at it, whether you’re an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist – art.

I’m not going to be like a rapper and mention the people I’m talking about in my songs by name.

I say if you don’t write your lyrics, then you can’t be the best rapper alive. Not at all. You can be one of the best artists, especially in rap, you gotta write everything yourself.

I like Jay-Z. I love Luda. I love Ledisi. I like Beyonce, of course. I think she’s just brilliant. She’s a triple threat. But my favorite – my all-time rapper is Tupac. See, I could have been Tupac’s girlfriend.

I think even before I knew I wanted to be a rapper, I wanted to be an entertainer. I was really into Michael Jackson as a kid.

Right after high school… the first time I ever recorded music was with a rapper, a friend of mine, and I would just be like, ‘I’ll sing your choruses.’ So I would sing his hooks and he would go in there and rap.

When it came time to be a professional rapper, I wouldn’t sign anything without reading it. There was no way I was going to have people make decisions for me or wake up one day and find that I was broke because I never bothered to read a contract.

I just feel like, with rappers, there’s so much complacency. It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m a rapper. I’m successful. I make money. That’s all that matters.’ But there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. Whether or not you’re aware of it, it’s happening.

People in the record business would say, Well, Pras, you know, you haven’t been out in a while, maybe you should get today’s hottest producer or rapper to do something.

All the other rappers around me aren’t saying anything worthwhile. They’re lost in rap: all they do is tell you they’re a sick MC and they’re better than you. I don’t want to look like all these other little punk, dress-up, fake, manufactured artists. I’m not a rapper. I’m an activist.

I think it would be different to work with a guy like Kanye West or Jay-Z, those guys are so phenomenal, but just to work with a rapper, I don’t think is really my thing. I really like songs, like true songs. Like indie songs.

Executives are convinced that a rapper has a certain lifespan as far as being a hot emcee. When you start to approach your 30s, pretty much stereotypically it’s over.

Pop culture mirrors culture, and, I think, as a rapper, hip-hop in a lot of ways mirrors the things that are happening in urban neighborhoods.

Gone are the days when you’d have to tune in to a mad illegal radio station late at night to be able to hear the rapper of your choice. That’s all changed now. That’s all gone out of the window. And I feel like I represent that change. I represent the era of iPods and Shuffle and things like that.

For me, performing is the biggest part of being a rapper. There’s nothing like the feeling of screaming your story to people.

‘Law 3’ shows my growth as a rapper. I don’t really like maintaining, so on every project, I’m going to show you my growth.

On ‘Old School,’ I was not an actor, I was Snoop Dogg, so I came to the set with a whole different vibe, and a different crew of people. And on ‘Starsky and Hutch,’ I was more of an actor. I wasn’t Snoop Dogg, the rapper.

Sometimes I will slow down the beat for one bar on purpose, just to see if the rapper can adapt his flow and stay on beat.

I want to take my rapper money and start my own assisted living facilities in Houston because I see what it looks like when you got your grandparents take care of your great-grandparents.

I plan to break the barriers that people try to trap female rappers in. This isn’t about ‘Oh she sounds good for a female rapper,’ it’s about ‘Yo, she sounds really good on this and can really rap!’

When you from Down South, it’s, ‘You’re a trap rapper,’ ‘You’re a street rapper.’ They try to put you in a category.

Because of social media, a lot of people think they can be, like, a rapper or a singer or a musician because they can put something on YouTube and it might become a thing because there’s – like – YouTube phenomenons and whatnot, you know? It’s not like they dedicated years to it or anything. It’s annoying.

It takes a certain type of rapper for me to really get into the album.

It’s like, boom! – I’ve got a girlfriend. It turned out to be a good thing because it made me a rapper.

Being a rapper and still trying to pursue an education is really overwhelming sometimes.

No matter you a rapper, actor, ball player, figure skater, some people gonna like you some people ain’t, you just hope that the majority is more like than dislike.

If an athlete plays the guitar, they say, ‘That’s so cool, he can play the guitar.’ But if a guy raps, they say, ‘Please don’t be another rapper,’ only because the rappers are so bad. I promise I’m not anything like that.

When I saw rappers in the ’90s cameo in films – all of those ’90s rappers – it seemed like whenever you chucked a rapper in a film, they could just act. It seemed like all rappers could act.

When I heard my first rap song and figured out what that was, I kind’ve stuck to it. I always wanted to be a musician in general, an entertainer. I just started rapping. I never decided, ‘Oh, I want to be a rapper.’

I was a rapper who was 13 or 14 years old at one point, and it was a dream. I used to see videos of other rappers around the world, and I used to hope that I could be like that one day.

I think Post Malone makes great records, but I don’t think he’s a good rapper at all.

Every person I meet is a rapper, DJ, or makes beats.

I only know English, so I feel like I can be the dopest French rapper ever if I learned French.

Being a rapper as a woman is not a good thing in Afghanistan. I kind of put my life in danger whenever I go somewhere to talk about women’s rights or make music, rap, or have interviews.

No U.K. rapper has been in my position; there are loads of big rappers like Tinie Tempah or Skepta, but no one has done what I have: had mainstream success with underground music and pop music.

I’m obviously not a rapper, and I don’t have any claims to be one, really.

I started off as a rapper from Thunder Bay, Ontario, believe it or not. There was a little group of 10 or 12 of us that would get together and copy each other’s cassettes. So I was a rapper first, and it was that music that got me into this great entertainment world and got me out of Thunder Bay.

I love songwriting, and rap is part of my songwriting, but I’m not a rapper.

Where I’m from in Harlem, everybody look like a rapper.

I don’t recall being excited about a new rapper, ever.

I wasn’t rapping and freestyling in high school. I wasn’t telling people I was gonna be a rapper when I was a little kid. It wasn’t set in stone that it was my dream.

One of my homeboys from my neighborhood had actually taught me how to rap. He was the rapper and we would all go over to his house. It would be like 10 or 12 of us in there and he’d write everybody’s rap in the house and would give everybody four or eight bars.

I feel like, O.K., if I can make it as a singer, then let me try rapping. If I can make it as a rapper, then let me try writing. All right? If I make it as a rap singer and writer, then why not try to produce? I don’t feel limited in any way.

I always want everything I do to be somewhat cinematic. I don’t want to be the rapper that’ll just post up and shoot a video anywhere with no real meaning to it.

Me being a rapper takes up too much of my time. I can’t really do the things I need to do, but I need the money.

If you a rapper, attention can turn into money.

I think a lot of rappers limit themselves by doing the gangster movies and that’s stereotypical for a rapper.

I personally think J-Cole is a better rapper than me; that’s how I feel.

I love being a female rapper and embracing my sexuality.

I think what sets a New York rapper apart from other rappers from other places is just being from New York.

Because hip-hop has no requirements, you deal with people that have the least intelligence on the planet. Some of the people that compare themselves to me, compare themselves to me because they rap and I rap. They can’t even read the contracts that they sign to be a rapper, to do the deal.