Too Short

“I've always looked like I have a sort of bad-boy image as Too Short. People take that for face value. I kind of like that. I like the image. It suits me well.”

“The biggest lesson to me is that I got the music from somewhere else - the notes, the music my parents listened to, and the stuff I listened to at every age. All of that inspired the music that I made.”

“In 1979, I was in ninth grade. Before I started tenth grade, I was already rapping myself. I didn't wait around to see what hip-hop was doing before I jumped in; I did it immediately. When I first heard it, I said, 'I can do this.'”

“I did not dream of being an entertainer in the sense of being the one out front. I dreamed of being in the band. As a child, I'm like, I'm going around the world, I'm gonna be in the band. That was my dream.”

“I have four favorite places for womanizing: L.A., Miami, New York, and Vegas.”

“Hip-hop is not one thing. There are 50 different approaches to making it and showing it.”

“As a child, I did not dream of being a rapper.”

“The only way I'll ever get married is in a business-friendship-relationship. It's gotta be like, 'This makes sense.' I'd marry for money.”

“You can be in the Bay and sell 10,000 copies of independent records and make 50 grand and that's your job for the year. The shows you do off of that and them 10,000 sales is gonna feed you and your homies.”

“I definitely don't wanna be in a fight with Nancy Grace. She look like she might can throw them thangs.”

“Twenty-two's my lucky number.”

“Somewhere around the fifth, sixth album, we got this little formula together where we knew how to record Too $hort songs. You need the bassline, a good drum pattern, call in the keyboard, the guitars - it's just a way we mixed it all together.”

“Hip-Hop is a voice.”

“Hip Hop is very addictive.”

“Too Short is a character.”

“I've got a core audience, so regardless of what I put out, I can sell 100,000 records on an independent.”

“Jive never saw any value in me as a long-term artist. Even as I was doing it they were like, 'You're not really the kind of artist that we'd spend our money on.' They never saw the value of Too $hort and E-40.”

“I don't think any other hip-hop artist has achieved what I've achieved or the numbers I've sold without commercial radio. MTV and BET have never supported me.”

“I think hip-hop brought it on itself. When rappers got a chance to talk to the media, they would get in the interview and say, 'It's all real life.' They play these characters, and then they can't stop playing the character when they're not working.”

“When I'm on the microphone and I'm recording, or onstage, or shooting a video, I'm doing my job. When I'm not, I'm being myself.”