Top 55 El-P Quotes

All I ever wanted to do, personally, was bring something new to what I loved: the thing that I loved the most, the music that I loved the most.

The bravest artists I’ve ever known have always been graf artists. Risking your life and your freedom is no joke.

If I can’t work, I don’t know what to do with myself.

Run The Jewels, me and Mike, and our connection and everything, came out of a period of time where I had personally lost everything.

There’s something in the German language that makes you feel like you’re getting a hug and a backstab at the same time.

There’s a lot of pretense out there. It can be exhausting. When people see something genuine, even if it’s something as simple as two people actually being friends, actually enjoying what they’re doing, or actually standing up for each other, that translates in a big way.

Some of the music I made for ‘Fantastic Damage’ I thought I was making for the Company Flow album, but the majority of it was post-Company Flow.

I’m not that prolific in terms of making my own music.

My videogame mind died after they stopped making wonderful escape worlds – every game just turned into me training to be in the army. But I used to love the Oddworld and ‘Abe’s Exoddus’ and ‘Abe’s Oddysee’ for Playstation.

The last Company Flow reunion show in New York City was pretty insane. Everybody knew all the words to every song; everybody had smiles on their faces. Those shows are what you hope for every time you get on the stage.

I just don’t believe in making music about making music anymore.

Music can feel empowering, or it can give a natural emotional voice to something people can’t express. This is why it’s beautiful.

The thing about hip-hop producers, and the thing about hip-hop musicians, is that we listen to everything. And we’re inspired by everything. I’d say even more so than any other genre of music.

I don’t necessarily think the way people do, but that’s not my problem. My problem is not to reinforce or destroy any ideas anyone might have about me, how I do what I do, what my intentions are, the way that I do it. My only job, as far as I can see, is to do the music that I want to do.

There’s always stuff to rebel against.

We all want recognition and validation to an extent for our art, but greatness as a trade for decency is a risky proposition. In my life, I try to leave the people I encounter with the feeling that they have been respected and treated with warmth and appreciation.

A lot of people thought ‘Funcrusher’ was super dark and hopeless, and I don’t think it was hopeless in any way.

I definitely grew up on Garfield. I just loved his pessimism.

‘The Venture Bros’ are my jam.

I like Das Racist, and so should you.

Standing up for what you believe is right, as well as standing up for what you believe is funny, standing up for what you believe is cool. As we found each other and the music that we do, we get to live out all of those things. That’s what Run The Jewels is: it’s all of those aspects of our personality.

You don’t know what it feels like to have someone go to bat for you until you really need it, and they do.

I strongly believe in the art form of the album.

I’ve never had a huge collection of records; I’ve never been a beat digga. I never been one of these guys who drives cross-country and knows some one-legged sailor who has a boat parked off some pier with a thousand Russian funk records that he stole from the Red Army in 1972.

It’s pretty cool being 40 and having your blow-up moment.

I’m not mad at digital media at all; I just see the importance and beauty of physical media.

I don’t ever really feel guilty about music, quite frankly. When you’re younger, you think that anything you don’t like, you have to hate. I’m so far beyond that perspective. Although, I will say I resent Bruno Mars for making me like him as much as I do. I wish that he wasn’t so likeable.

The thing I love about music is, if you do it long enough, you get better and better at translating what’s in your head to a medium. That’s why I keep doing it.

I just love Steven Seagal for his pure – his perspective on what being a hero is: just a purely evil, cruel perspective.

The thing about Steven Seagal is that he clearly wants to be a great person, but he just doesn’t know how.

I would have to be traditional and say that my favorite era of hip-hop was between ’85-’89. That was the era that got me to love hip-hop.

I think it’s impossible for hip-hop to be a dying art form.

Atheists are just as obnoxious if not more obnoxious than zealots.

I’m a cat guy. I’m absolutely a cat guy. I grew up with cats.

I think any teenager, any single parent household teenager growing up in New York City, will probably go through tumultuous years. I definitely did. It all sort of righted itself once I definitively got on the path of being a musician or, like, following that directly.

I grew up on listening to, like, Mantronix and BDP and EPMD and Kool G Rap and Ultramag and Public Enemy and Fat Boys and Run DMC and a lot of those early records, those Rubin-era records. Those were always snare- and stab-heavy records.

I literally have a massive database of cat sounds.

For me, the idea of releasing a free record is powerful if everybody gets it for free at the same time.

I’m of the generation that discovered Aerosmith because of Run-DMC. They just looked crazy to me. They were the dudes in the Run-DMC video. That’s who Aerosmith was.

I reserve the right to think many different things and to change my mind and to even be wrong.

You can always get something cool out of a collaboration – you can always have a moment – but meeting someone that you want to collaborate with continuously, that’s a different thing.

I’m really pretty ridiculous about how much I work on my music, and I don’t look at it as necessarily a good quality. I look at it as a side effect of my apparent insanity. It is what it is, man.

I had a year, where… I was secretly, 100 percent, dead broke.

You put a piece of music out, and it’s not in your hands anymore, and that’s cool with me.

Just because I run an indie label doesn’t mean I don’t think Jay-Z is nice.

Darkness does not truly have sway. I think that it’s weak.

If you live in a crowded area of Brooklyn or Manhattan, having a car is a hindrance. It doesn’t even make sense. I basically grew up all my life without a car.

I think that Gordon Ramsay is maybe one of the most entertaining people ever on television. And I would love to pretend to be Gordon Ramsay and walk into a restaurant uninvited and attempt to make them change their menu. It’s just a personal fantasy of mine.

I don’t hate Jay-Z. I think he’s dope.

With me, I’m going to have a label where no one is ever cheated, ever.

My New York, the one I identify with as a kid, has greatly changed. And I’m sure the people who were adults when I was a kid probably felt the same way.

I had a boom box with a dual cassette deck and a mic, so I used to make pause tapes. I think a lot of people started like that because it was all I had. I would just take rap records that I liked and just loop the beat by pressing pause and record and make, like, five minutes of these beats.

I really only put stuff out when I have something to say and I feel like I’ve got a direction and I’ve got an idea – and that can even take two, two-and-a-half years to flesh out.

Anything that gets to the more emotional and dark side of music, I always enjoy.

I’m not a ‘dystopian, futuristic master’: I’m a schnook walking the street. It’s an insane reality we’re living in, and I’m just trying to translate it for myself.