Questlove Quotes

But that California trip was just a flash in the eye of that year. The rest of the time, I hung in purgatory, playing talent shows and showcases here and there, living like a normal teenager in Philadelphia. Or maybe I should say living like a normal black teenager, which meant that aimlessness was accompanied by a certain unique set of risks. One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don’t really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2’s Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? The officer actually drew a gun. I was terrified. The worst part of all was that when I saw the police in the rearview mirror, I started thinking that maybe I had stolen the car. I don’t know what the psychological phenomenon is called, exactly, but when you encircle someone with suspicion, the idea of guilt just starts to appear within them. It was a terrible feeling and it’s a terrible process, and it was another reminder that the life I was leading, while superficially uneventful, had the potential to turn against me at any moment.

And it’s more than a metaphor. It’s a physical state. Think of all the things you do in the course of a day. For most tasks, the best-case scenario is that your mind is bright, sharp, and alert. Figure out whether you’re a morning person (like me) or a night person (sadly, also like me), and schedule your tasks for that time. If you need to get up at five in the morning so you can answer all your correspondence without a foggy brain, that’s what you should do. If you need to stay late in the office so you can transcribe your notes from the meeting, that’s what you should do.

And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.

I don’t like the shrug. It’s an abdication of responsibility for making sure that art keeps doing the things that art should do. If you shrug, that keeps the wheels turning the way they’re turning. It lets corporations turn you into selfish consumers. It lets them fit you for a new pair of blinkers. And that means that predictability keeps getting prized over experimentation and product keeps getting prized over art.

Switching off perfection switched on the human quality

Make your environment reflective of your tastes. Eliminate distractions, including the distraction of being without any of the distractions you need.

Whenever there’s a story happening, there’s more than one story happening.

Much later in life, I had a friend who tried to explain Roland Barthes to me; not all of it, of course, but that one little principle about how a text is not a unified thing, but a fragmentary or divisible thing, and that the reader is the one who divides it up, arbitrarily. Reading is the act that creates the pieces.

I worry that it’ll be harder for the present generation to process memory, because they have so many options to choose from, and most aren’t shared in a physical space.

…Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years. I’m probably trendier now as a 42-year-old than I’ve ever been…

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

Whatever your personal preference, no matter how significant or how trivial, if it’s a source of pleasure, and in denying yourself that pleasure you’ll be entering a state where you think about it all the time, then you are working against your own creativity. You might think certain things are a distraction, but going without them can become a larger distraction if you are thinking all the time about the time when you will be returned to them, or them to you.

What a shitty way to go through life, hiding your love for music so that people don’t think the wrong things about you.

Records can be replayed after they end. Lives can only be remembered.

There are now apps that let you change your onscreen face in real time before you take selfies. This can’t be helped. People who are purely presentational will remain that way. I’m more worried about the effect on creative people. The goal of creativity may be to learn to present yourself to others, in part, but it’s not to present yourself at the expense of truth. The second you become your own product, you’re heading down a chute rather than up a ladder.