Quotes from Black Thought

We usually overrecord. Then we boil it down to the cream of the cream.

I'm tryin' to get some acting credibility, get some other work.

It's weird what can trigger the beginning of a song or some bars. It can be a banging slice of apple pie or it can be smelling a certain perfume or something.

You can only be the great artist for so long - come out with effort after effort that garners all this praise.

Life is just a moment of time and it pass by

Passyunk Productions is our film & tv production company. The name comes from a street in Philly, Passyunk Avenue, where the concept of The Roots was born, as Ahmir and I started out busking on the corner of 5th & Passyunk back in the early '90s.

The most profound memory I have from my childhood is burning down my house at 6 years old.

Our plan for Passyunk Productions is to make an impact in the film & tv world by leveraging our collective resources, telling great stories and creating smart programming told from a unique perspective.

I think we need more community health programs and we need to develop programs that are low-cost.

I work well within The Roots because I can let my music speak for itself while Ahmir does most of the press and the promotion and the brand-building because he enjoys that.

Don't do anything for fear, because fear will never do anything for you.

As we get further into our career we're figuring out how to become more efficient as artists, and doing so many different things is testament to our cohesiveness as the Roots.

I think poor folks are the only people who cannot afford - financially and otherwise - to be sick.

I was raised as a Muslim.

I do not seem like a funny guy.

We record in the spirit of the Berry Gordy camp and Gamble & Huff, where people were writing up to a dozen quality songs within a day because the competition was that hard.

I like to say hip-hop was born when I was in my mother's womb.

To me I think leadership is activism. It's giving back to your community, it's investing in oneself, and you know women and children.

Something that is funny, that I use sometimes if I'm doing comedy, is the fact that I'm now often mistaken for the rapper Rick Ross. And I don't know that I've ever corrected anyone - like I've never said, 'No no, I'm not Rick Ross, I'm Black Thought from The Roots.'

For me, the arts has always been sort of my saving grace.

Commercial success won't come to us from a change in the music. It will gradually be the result of a change in the appetite of the audience.

Anyone that I've ever worked with, it's not like I just meet you or someone throws us together for the sole purpose of coming up with a song that's gonna be a hit. I have to have some sort of relationship, or we had to have interacted on some other sort of level and that's when it feels most natural.

I like that the hard-core ruffians, the street thugs come up to me and say, 'Man, you killed it with Adele.'

I don't know that Dilla was the father of neo-soul as much as he was highly influential in that time when he was doing what he was doing at his best... Dilla's influence transcended genre and it transcended region.