Quotes About Relevance

The artists with lyrical content and who say something seem to outlast the fad rappers - I always noticed that.

I don't want to be 50 years old and rapping, man. I'm pretty sure nobody wants to do that.

It's quite rare to be in something that you would love to watch as well.

The pleasure of one's effect on other people still exists in age - what's called making a hit. But the hit is much rarer and made of different stuff.

Now if you call 'Ain't No Half-Steppin' ' or 'Raw' an old-school song, I agree with you. But if you call Big Daddy Kane an old-school artist, I disagree with you.

It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.

Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel, and I want to be successful and reach a big audience. I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world; I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another.

We've reached a point where people don't even know how to look for anything fundamentally important anymore.

I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

It's not about how much screen time I have, what matters is reaching out to a huge number of people.

So it's one of those things where we have to - our problem is pacing ourselves and still reaching a large enough number of our audience. Because we don't want to burn the audience. And we don't want to be excluding anybody.

It's not always about reaching the widest audience. It's about how you reach people, and in that sense, there's no difference between a little room in a back basement with ten people if you hit them hard enough, there's a nobility to reaching ten people. They are not irrelevant because they are less than 10,000.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

Too many ads that try not to go over the reader's head end up beneath his notice.

I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading.

If you look at the heritage of the best advertising, you can make stuff that is great for both readers and advertisers. I don't think Don Draper would have loved banner ads.

Don't send out a newsletter just to send out a newsletter. One newsletter a year that is really interesting is more beneficial than 12 that are boring. If you write two or three boring newsletters in a row, your readers will start to think you write boring books.

'The Duino Elegies' are notoriously cryptic, and part of the reason why I have always loved them is because they invite multiple readings over the course of a lifetime.

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

We are ready to say that we rule the entire Elgin enterprise as irrelevant to the present.

Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don't want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don't, but they should.

Facebook was just John the Baptist. Twitter is the real deal.

I won in Italy, I won at Real Madrid, and I felt important.

I'm hands-on with everything, always trying to reach the real people.