Top 60 Paul Wall Quotes

I always knew that if I built my name up as an entity, that would be bigger than me just rappin’.

Whether it’s in the streets or its a nine-to-five, you can be hustling in many different aspects.

When I fell in love with music, particularly hip-hop, I listened to it in the car. In Texas, you’ve got to drive, and sometimes you wanna listen to something good. Not something that’s loud with a bunch of screaming for two minutes. That’s a different type of music.

We sell a lot of jewelry, not just the grills. We got a whole line of watches, me and my boy Johnny Dane.

I’ve always been adventurous – my wife calls me ‘the Hip Hop Crocodile Hunter’ – if you can survive in the hood, you can survive anywhere.

The surgery I got is called gastric sleeve.

Helping teach my son right from wrong, what to do and how to be a man, just about life in general, same thing with my daughter, it’s just very important to me.

Honestly, I personally would prefer to have my name not mentioned alongside codifiers, like ‘white rapper’ or things like that, because the codifiers I like are Texas rappers. If you were to compare me to Lil’ Keke or the people that really inspired me, like UGK… In my mind, that’s who I think I should be compared to.

You can spend $200 or $50 for tennis shoes – it’s about what you can afford.

I want to be here for my kids. I don’t want to have a heart attack.

Now that I got a son, it encourages me to work even harder.

I felt I had to earn my way. I had nobody to support me.

I used to have this jersey, it was a Kenyon Martin jersey, with a little grease stain on it, I didn’t think anyone else could see it. I looked down to my jersey and I was like, ‘OK, I’m good.’ Next thing I know I’m seeing all these pictures of myself with a big ol’ grease stain.

I never won any award, ever, except for a Houston Press award, but other than that, I never won an award.

To me, one of the greatest albums I ever put out was the album I did with Statik Selektah.

We always joke about how I’m on the road and they’ll be like, ‘Man, you need to take a shower.’ Nah, it ain’t Saturday. It ain’t Sunday. I take a shower once a month. Nah, it ain’t that bad. You know, baby ain’t gonna handle that. My wife is not gon’ handle that. She’s not gon’ have me walking about the house stankin’.

I used to, but when I stopped… It’s something you gotta get out your system. But when I stopped wearing deodorant, I stopped getting as funky when I sweat. I don’t know if it’s just a hormone thing.

I’m gonna rap the same whether I’m white, black, or Hispanic, I’m still gonna be me.

You don’t realize when you’re younger that how I treat this person coming up to me will affect their view of me for the rest of their lives. You can lose several fans because that one person will tell all the rest of their people about it, or they could be like, ‘Man, that dude was cool as hell.’

You can look in the mirror and try to hide it and cover it up, and it may work here or there, but there ain’t no shirt or hat you can put on or haircut you can get to hide the fact that you’re morbidly obese.

My career will come to an end like they all do. I know how this business works.

There’s health risks in anything, even if you’re just drinking soda or drinking lemonade! If you drink too much lemonade you drink too much sugar and you could get diabetes.

I just want to be an artist. I like making music. I don’t want to be the one tryin’ to figure out how we’re going to market the album.

Hot Boyz always shouted out a lot of things relevant to Texas so I connected with it. They were our neighbors and growing up we went to Louisiana every year for Mardi Gras, Bayou Classic and the Essence festival, so we grew up taking trips to Lafayette and New Orleans. Those were three annual trips.

I was hustling out of shops kind of doing, selling music out of my trunk, selling grills out of my trunk, too. And then I teamed up with Johnny Dang, he was the local, the grill man who made them for the dentist.

I’d be on the airplane and have to ask for seatbelt extensions.

When my mom grew up, her father was in the military so she grew up all over the world. She lived in Germany, Jerusalem, Switzerland, all over.

I know for me, I wanted to prove everyone wrong and prove that I could make it on my own.

When the work stops the success stops.

I always felt like I could hold my own with anybody, period. And I always have strived to do my best.

I love to watch baseball in Fenway Park. They have an awesome energy there.

I started off doing street team work for No Limit and Def Jam. I was the waterboy, the scrub. I was passing out demo tapes, and nobody wanted to hear them.

I’m not really interested in rappers who talk about rap. I don’t talk about it, and I don’t like listening to other people talk about it. So I stick to the things that I know. You know, things like cars, ultimate fighting. I have a lot of songs about cars, because they’re a big part of my lifestyle.

I never felt like I had a lack of talent.

I was Overflow. Another one I had was the Caped Crusader. Chamillionaire was Payroll. That was our group back then, Payroll and the Caped Crusader. We grew up on the same street so we lived a few houses down from each other. So we knew each other pretty much all our life.

On every verse I do, I’m going to try to improve myself in some type of way.

Dallas is more in line with mainstream America. But Houston’s farther down on the map where it’s a little different. I think it’s the slowness of our culture, how we move slow. It’s hot in here, you know. We got our own culture, our own slang, a little bit our own way of doing things.

My wife’s a real big country fan. One time, we were driving back and forth from L.A. to Houston, and we wrote a country song together.

Don’t be so quick to turn your back on people who are fighting things. You need to be there for them.

I just like making music. Record, record, record.

Having traveled a lot outside of this country, I’ve had a lot of vaccines and shots to go to different countries.

To be able to do a song with Kanye West and then a video with Hype Williams who directed the video, that’s a highlight of any artist’s’ career.

Music’s supposed to be entertaining. But there are different types of entertainment.

A lot of the jewelers – not that they’re not good people – but they’re hustlers.

I think bad breath is… just hard to get past. Someone with just horrible breath, yeah. I’m not talking about just onion breath. I’m talking about you been brushing your teeth and using the mouthwash and it still smells like you’ve been tongue-kissing the toes of a gorilla – that’s horrible.

It’s great to have an album like that get love 10-15 years down the line.

Trends are trends. They come. They go. I just do what I do.

I followed the footsteps of Scarface, Willie D, Bushwick Bill, Big Pokey, Lil Keke, Fat Pat, Big Moe, and Slim Thug. Those are the people who I was following behind, not the white rappers who came before me. No disrespect intended, I just didn’t follow that lane, I followed this one.

If I meet somebody and I’m like, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ And you give somebody a hug, or a half-hug, and they stank and it rubs off on me, that is contagious ’cause I’ll be smelling like roses and then it’s like, ‘Wait a minute.’ I’ll change shirts and I’m still funky.

When you see Paul Wall, I’m always going to be the same person. I might have on a new grill, I might have on some new jewelry. I might’ve put on some pounds, I might’ve lost some pounds. You never know.

I take a lot of pride in being from Texas. I love all parts of Texas – even the things I hate about Texas I love.

People always tell me I’m an anomaly or an outlier. I’m just me.

I don’t think being white defines who I am.

Swishahouse, it started off as just a crew making mixtapes and that’s when I got down with it back in like 1998. It wasn’t a record label at first. It was all just for promotion, for fun, and we just had a crew representin’ for our hood.

I do my music for the people, for the fan base, you know they’re the one’s that keep me going and keep me motivated with it.

I just try to live my life as who I am.

You might not think that, because I have so many of them, but I’m an absolute punk when it comes to tattoos.

I get distracted easily.

Some people will come up to me and say, somebody stole this from you flow-wise. I’ll say I gave it. Who am I to be a gatekeeper? Anything I did, I’m giving it to the world.

The groupies, they been around since I was 16, that’s when we started off doing the independent thing. I’ve grown up now, I’m a man, so it’s time for me to make man decisions in my life so that’s what I’m doing, and just jumping over that broomstick and tying the knot was one of ’em.