Quotes from Jerry Heller

Suge was a part-time security guard at Ruthless. He can be a very charming guy, and my initial instincts were to help him. Eazy was more perceptive: he always thought he was going to be a problem.

I think that N.W.A. picked up where Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have gone if they hadn't been assassinated.

I was always excited about doing things with people that were ahead of their time, that were sort of out of sync with the rest of society.

Who were the biggest acts in the world in 1987? Guns N' Roses and Metallica. I shamelessly pandered to surfers and skateboarders, and in pictures from then, you'll see Slash and those guys wearing N.W.A stuff. If they thought it was cool, people in Kansas and Wyoming would buy it. That's how we broached the subject.

There are two kinds of people in the entertainment industry: Those that close deals and those that don't.

No one survived on the streets without a protective mask. No one survived naked. You had to have a role. You had to be "thug," "playa," "athlete," "gangsta," or "dope man." Otherwise, there was only one role left to you: "victim.

But shitty human beings sometimes make great art.

Eazy, Dre, Cube. Conceptualizer, musicalizer, lyricizer. Father, son, and holy ghost. The trinity behind N.W.A.

Ghetto denizens are supposed to stay put. That's what the ghetto is for. Straight Outta Compton was a jailbreak.

I thought you looked like a guy who liked to enjoy hisself," Eazy told me later. "You were the first white guy I ever really talked to who wasn't trying to collect rent or arrest me.

I grew up in that era of Hendrix and Joplin and The Doors, and the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury, and even the Panthers. That was my era; that's what I was into.

My dad wasn't a gangster, and he wasn't a criminal, but he sure liked to rub padded shoulders with them.

I'm the boogeyman used to scare South Central kids when they tell ghost stories.

I am what I am, but I'm not a thief. And I'm not scandalous.

N.W.A. were the first great rap audio documentarians of the problems in our inner cities.

Gangsta rap was the most important movement since the beginning of rock n' roll.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

The problem of the Panthers is that they scared people. The music of N.W.A didn't scare people; it taught people what it was like to grow up in our inner cities.

I don't want to be judged next to guys like Suge Knight. I want to be measured next to David Geffen, Irving Azoff, and Clive Davis. Whether I measure up or not, I let my record speak for me. That's how I want to be judged - by what I've done, not by what people like Ice Cube and Dr. Dre have said about me.

The music business and I were made for each other.

I was always a champion of the minority, of the underdog.

I'm a child of the sixties. I grew up with a president who was a crook, who put us into the most unpopular war in history, who had no communication with people under thirty. I had seen the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Panthers and the Diggers; I understood what they were about.

The more parents hate the music, the more their children will like it. It had been true with Elvis, and it had been true with the Rolling Stones. 'Straight Outta Compton' was music that parents could loathe with a passion. I knew we had a massive hit.

N.W.A had something in common with the Rolling Stones and MC5 and groups like that: the voice of rebellion. It's rebellion against your parents. It's rebellion against the system. It's rebellion against society.