Saul williams quotes

If you're just addressing your own emotions and challenging yourself to find some sort of harmonious sense of being in life and questioning authority and questioning what's given and questioning what's expected of you, you're already on the cusp of finding something in yourself, and maybe waking something in somebody else.

I didn't ever want to make a rap album. I considered it too limiting. Now that's exactly what I've gone and done

I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.

I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons

I'm very excited about the resurgence of vinyl which seems to parallel a growing interest in live performance.

I have a very family-like connection to hip-hop, which is why it frustrates me so much.

I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.

I think it's misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f - king whoever we wanna f - k.

I feel pretty vulnerable all the time.

I can't say that I always want to get out of bed, you know.

Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun

I'm somewhat of an empath, I would say. I relate easily to ideas and stories, books, films, music. I'm moved by all of these things. Art in general. But not just art, you know?

We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there.

If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts.

It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.

I'm usually trying to get back into the dream or analyzing the dream. And yeah, the days, most days begin like that.

The organization of self, and all self-aligning principles would be those that I promote.

There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work.

I've always been inspired by a lot of work coming out of the UK

What I'm aiming to do within hip-hop is to point out that the music itself is powerful; it reaches so many people.

intelligence is intuitive you needn't learn to love unless you've been taught to fear and hate

Sometimes our thoughts and feelings are our most prized possessions... and then there are times to let go of your possessions and wander.

Hip-hop is too young to put a definition on it

The downfall of the industry seems to actually be good for art. I think the industry will find their way once the focus shifts from its greed-based origins, downsizes, and begins to support creative visions that speak to our times and shifting ideals.

Punk rock meditation, that's what keeps it going. That's how I let go, you know. It's exactly what I do, I blast it and run around crazy banging my head on the wall.

Come, my love, we have oceans to sail.

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.

What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.

Art can play a major role. I look at art as an alternative source of energy, the same way we might look at wind or solar or lithium batteries.

I am hoping for peaceful transition into a new age. Obama has already played a great role in initiating us into that vision. If he were to be harmed in any way, it would spawn the birth of a million Obamas.

I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.

pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near (...) the beginning

Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life.

The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.

It's crazy when you see very little reflection between what's played on the radio and what people are talking about in the streets. It lets you know how far off we are from a real movement.

There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, “yes,” in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.

Your library teacher would say, "What happens to a generation that doesn't read the Classics?" Me, I'm not your library teacher. But I have some of the same questions and concerns, you know?

Music has always pushed ahead social movements and can do much more than just dumb down a populace.

she stuck a bookmark in my heart and walked away

Сommercial hip-hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip-hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the heroes of capitalism - you know that's not rebellion. That's not "the street" - that's Wall Street.

I've never believed it's really so important that you conform to the ways of the system in order to beat the system. I think that the system follows a great deal.

Vulnerability is power.

Talk to strangers when the family fails and friends lead you astray when Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay. 'Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms: in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm, and when you finally take the time to see what they’re about perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out.

Legislation won't necessarily start a riot. But the right song can make someone pick up a chair.

Jay Z and President Bush have a lot in common, that same brash confidence

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people - eavesdropping, basically. I'm vulnerable to all of it.

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.

I want to connect music to its highest power - which is heightening consciousness and affecting people's reality. That can't be done in normal ways, not according to my experience.

I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the "black people's CNN." Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It's biased, and highly suspect.

i am like a survivor of the flood walking through the streets drenched with God surprised that all of the drowned victims are still walking and talking

You start to realize connections between experiences and things that push your buttons, and things that have touched you in those vulnerable areas and what-have-you. And they form a little collection over time - at least I do - and as time progresses and new things are learned, you kind of sift through those things until they're air or danceable, you know? But they start as this thing that's either too hard or too soft to dance to.

I think everybody on this planet does that - trying to capture your dream after you wake up.

For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children so long for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers we live

The most powerful political voices are those with a different way of seeing and processing the world and the sounds that emanate from it.

When I finally decide that I'm ready to get out of bed, it could be the sunlight, it could be the fact that I'm awake, and, OK, first of all, I wake up in the morning because I have to go to the bathroom.

There is a lot of fun to be had when you try and fit as many words as you can within a three-minute song, but there is also a lot of fun in trying to get that message across in three words, or better yet when the music can overpower the words and convey something really pure and perfect that affects our psycho-emotional space.

I think that heartbreak is a good thing.

Two autumns and I have not changed enough.

Niggy Tardust' is the voice of a generation, a generation that does not define itself simply by what it's born into.

You change the beat up, you might change the way people dance to the music. If you change the way they move, maybe they'll think about it differently.

The hero is the person who's afraid to run away.

When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyle atop some crumbling building, spring to life a resuscitated angel.

she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun

I used to have weird practices in crowded used-book stores in New York where I'd go in and just stomp my foot and see what fell from the shelf. And of course, because it's an unexpected encounter, there's always some magic that comes from it.

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

i laced my shoes with sorrow and walked a weary road dead end streets don't come undone with double knots wing tipped shoes that walk on air through vacant lots

I was fed by the music I listened to as a kid. Hip-hop fed me psychologically, spiritually, politically. I learned from that music.

I don't really believe in writer's block or anything like that. If I'm not feeling words, I may pick up an instrument and play with sounds or delve into different types of creativity and expression.

the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

Fax me a fact, and I'll telegram a hologram.

American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.

When I wake up in the morning, the first things that I see are the clouds. They're right there. I look out my window now and there's always, always a black bird of some sort on the ledge there. Usually I wake up and look at the birds.

I feel that people need to be jolted out of their comfort zones.

I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions.

My love is my soul's imagination. How do I love you? Imagine.

There is nothing more negligent than attempting to address a problem one finds on a branch than by censoring the leaves.

When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.

I hear the weed is really strong in California.

I think that the heart is a lot like those wonderful fruit, like coconut and mangoes, you know, you have to break the skin, you have to break it open to get to the good part.

The wind is the moon's imagination wandering.

My father's a preacher, my mother's a teacher, thus... I rhyme.

Some rather seek up high Than dig and grind that inner truth

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.

The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence

If you feel something, you should do it.

I'm a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear - you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things - or critiques or whatever - or could be very simple things that are said.

I think it's a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn't seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that's ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.

The thing I've been talking about with daughter is the idea of - and I'm talking about essentially in America - the possibility of, a lost generation. I've been listening to a lot of music - as a fan, as a critic, as somebody who likes to dance - but I hear, you know, within these songs and half the people I hear, these philosophies encoded and embedded in these songs.

Fax me a fact and I'll telegram a hologram or telephone the son of man and tell him he is done. Leave a message on his answering machine telling him there are none. God and I are one. Times moon. Times star. Times sun. The factor is me. You remember me.

A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.

I dance for no reason, for reasons you can't dance, Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance You can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can't be store-bought.

We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is our alchemy.

Half of the popcorn sh-t that's out there, we know it's popcorn. But we're like, "It's my guilty pleasure." I feel like we have more guilty pleasure than actual f - kin' pleasure.

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written

this is her body this is her blood

The only reason I've been so critical of hip-hop is because I've always been aware of the effect that it has, and the reflection that it gives of the African-American community.

Honestly, I don't always want to get up in the mornings, but I do anyway.

the anchor man thrown overboard has simply rooted us in history's repeating cycle

It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.

Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?

only through new words might new worlds be called into order

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love