Ego is my career. Rap music is all ego.

My daughter is going to college and I'm very proud of her and my son is pursuing his own career in rap.

— Jason Bonham

I think rap music is rap music. I mean, are there heavy writing aspects of it? Absolutely. In a sense, is it poetry? Yeah.…

— Earl Sweatshirt

My mom, she got taken away from me when I was 14 years old. She is incarcerated. My sister was incarcerated. I was homeless.…

— Sean Kingston

I'm 100 percent original, and that's what got me here. My rap music is more understandable, slower. It tells a story. You can write…

— Tupac Shakur

I always did poetry, and [rap music is] pretty much hip-hop melody with poems.

— Tiffany Foxx

I feel like with music there's so much ego rooted in expressing your thoughts and your experiences with it.

— Maynard James Keenan

The music should be first, not the ego or the personality or the style.

— Dewey Redman

It was 100 percent music. There was no ego involved, no attitudes, no black and white, it was pure music.

— Lee Konitz

It just happens to be that people like to associate poetry and rap music. I think that idea is kind of corny.

— Earl Sweatshirt

Let the voice be the voice of the voiceless and let it come from the world of rap music to keep the stereotype and…

— Chuck D

Catch me in Vegas spinnin' the green I re-up with more chips than a vending machine Then you can catch me in Rome making…

— Ludacris

For a long period of time, the media covered rap music and hip hop the same way they cover a lot of black people,…

— Chuck D

Some believe in love and some believe in friends but Niggas like me believe in making ends 'Cause even when your bitch wants to…

— Dj Quik

It's not that you don't make any money doing conscious rap music. You make a lot of money doing this, but if you're greedy…

— KRS-One

Public Enemy started out as a benchmark in rap music in the mid-1980s. We felt there was a need to actually progress the music…

— Chuck D