Kendrick Lamar

“My word will never be as strong as God's word. All I am is just a vessel, doing His work.”

“I don't want to be something that just comes and goes.”

“I knew I was blessed with a gift of having both parents.”

“Groups break up because they never got across what they wanted to do personally, and they have creative differences, and egos start to clash.”

“People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can't knock it.”

“Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.”

“I like to let things breathe.”

“My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.”

“As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.”

“Before finding music, I didn't have too many aspirations. I wanted to hang out, make a little money from whatever I had to do.”

“When I went back to my old high school, all these kids looking at me like I'm the real big homie, the same way I look at Jay Z, Nas, or Dr. Dre. You would've thought Michael Jackson walked through that joint off the excitement that they had.”

“My pops and my mom started playing Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers and all these people, but at the same time, they always had Snoop on right behind it in the same mix.”

“The hardest thing for - not only an artist but for anybody to do is look themselves in the mirror and acknowledge, you know, their own flaws and fears and imperfections and put them out there in the open for people to relate to it.”

“I'm putting out this free music, constantly putting it out.”

“Me, as a person, I grow. I'm like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.”

“My folks ain't graduated from high school or nothing like that, so we always had to struggle in the family - and I come from a big family.”

“The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It's scary.”

“Sometimes you have the trends that's not that cool. You may have certain artists portraying these trends and don't really have that lifestyle, and then it gives off the wrong thing. And it becomes kinda corny after awhile. It's really about keeping hip-hop original and pushing away the corniness in it.”

“I'm only as good as my last word, my last hook, my last bridge.”

“I always tell people that if I move anywhere it would be Toronto.”