When I really like something, I tend to never listen to it again. I want to remember the feeling even more than I want to remember the music. If you … - Questlove

I still don’t know if I am truly creative...At times I feel like I’m a way better student than I am teacher or maker.

I wasn’t a normal kid.

My father used to say half-jokingly that there was a little concern over whether or not I was okay. Maybe it wasn’t a joke at all. The concern was about my personality, which seemed too eccentric. I don’t think “autistic” was a common term back then, but I later found out that they had taken me to a doctor to see if something was really wrong.

It wasn’t that I was violent or temperamental. In fact, my mom said it was a blessing because I never gave her trouble. It was the opposite — they knew exactly how to sedate me, which was to sit me in front of something that held my interest and then just leave. I’d develop a deep relationship with that thing, whether it was Soul Train or a record on a turntable. But that led to a secondary worry, which was that I was falling inward into some kind of trance. Once, when I was very young, my dad installed a light with a rotating shade around a lightbulb, one of those lamps that works like a kind of carousel. He pressed the switch that caused the shade to turn and, according to him, I just disappeared inside myself. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, and I didn’t seem any less interested in the rotating lamp. Then my parents started noticing a broader pattern of me trying to spin stuff. I would take my sister’s bike and watch the wheel go around and around. I would take my father’s records and twirl them on my finger. They had a moment where they thought I might be interested in cars, because I was driving the records like a steering wheel. That was my whole entertainment for a while there, but to my parents, it was almost like a bad habit that they wanted me to drop. But I haven’t dropped it, not at all. To this day, my life revolves around circles. My drums are circles. Turntables are circles. My logo or autograph, which I developed over the years through doodling, is composed of six circles. My life revolves around that shape.

You have to throw things away so that there is some value implied by the act of keeping other things.