Wyclef Jean

“I'm hands-on with everything, always trying to reach the real people.”

“I'm most comfortable when you just give me a guitar and I just sing.”

“I know that the nice shines I have on is going to pass. The nice cars will pass. All that will stay is the music and the work. That's where I get the inspiration to help people out and work.”

“When you enter the realm of politics, you don't enter it because you want to be popular. When I want to be popular, I pull on a guitar and sing a song.”

“I lived in the projects and the ghetto, and turned the negative into a positive.”

“You know, I'm a modern day Harry Belafonte; I got the swagger of the island.”

“What I'm trying to do is break the genre from what is rap and what is music.”

“I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.”

“I'm cheap, and I'm proud of it!”

“I feel that life is short, so we should be disciplined, but at the same time we should have a good time.”

“When I'm rhyming it's all in my head... Like the slaves, when they were picking cotton, they would block out their minds. They would sing.”

“I'm like a hippie. At the end of the day, that's what my voice caters to.”

“When I was 11 years old, I started playing guitar.”

“Coming from Haiti and growing up in Brooklyn, there's a lot of European influence when I get dressed up. I wear a lot of fitted suits, elegant cuts; I think it's cool to mash up a lot of different looks.”

“You get quick money, it's beautiful, there's sunshine, but at the end of the day, you find out it's all a masquerade, baby. It's not what it seems.”

“With Yele Haiti, the first thing was I'm proud of the organization and the work that the organization has done, and in the future hope to continue doing.”

“Rap records don't make you feel good no more. Six months after release, it can't come back as a classic.”

“When the Fugees were big, we made a whole lot of money, and what happened was that I saved my money and never spent it.”

“When I rap, I get to express myself in a way where putting words together is like poetry, and sometimes it's better to talk in certain expressions than sing, you know? So I love, I love to rhyme when I want to express certain things.”

“My songs are really never titled. Sometimes I call it one thing. then I change it.”