Saul Williams Quotes - Page 3

Art itself is underserved when we don't realize the power of it.

I think everything has its place. So if the ideas or the fluidity isn't coming in writing, maybe it's related to ingestions.

It was always important to me to be that kid who could rock the party as well as rock the English professor's mind.

I think it's misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f - king whoever we wanna f - k.

When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyle atop some crumbling building, spring to life a resuscitated angel.

The only reason I've been so critical of hip-hop is because I've always been aware of the effect that it has, and the reflection that it gives of the African-American community.

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.

There is a lot of fun to be had when you try and fit as many words as you can within a three-minute song, but there is also a lot of fun in trying to get that message across in three words, or better yet when the music can overpower the words and convey something really pure and perfect that affects our psycho-emotional space.

American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems.

A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.

I hear the weed is really strong in California.

When I wake up in the morning, the first things that I see are the clouds. They're right there. I look out my window now and there's always, always a black bird of some sort on the ledge there. Usually I wake up and look at the birds.

It's not the rules everywhere, you know? That's not the rules everywhere - that things have to be dumbed down in order to become massively popular. And that hasn't always been the rule, even in America.

The role that theater has placed in enhancing consciousness and moving systems ahead. I think of what South African theater meant for the apartheid movement, for example. I think of what music has meant for so many social movements across time.

I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people - eavesdropping, basically. I'm vulnerable to all of it.

There's so much to be found in literature, especially if you don't have the money to travel or the means to get out of your neighborhood or get off work.

Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun

I can't say that I always want to get out of bed, you know.

We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there.

It's crazy when you see very little reflection between what's played on the radio and what people are talking about in the streets. It lets you know how far off we are from a real movement.

I have a very family-like connection to hip-hop, which is why it frustrates me so much.

I was fed by the music I listened to as a kid. Hip-hop fed me psychologically, spiritually, politically. I learned from that music.

I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.

I'm a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear - you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things - or critiques or whatever - or could be very simple things that are said.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written