Quotes by Eminem
Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Eminem. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Eminem
Marshall Bruce Mathers III (born October 17, 1972), known professionally as Eminem (often stylized as EMINƎM), is an American rapper, songwriter, actor, and record producer. Eminem is among the best-selling music artists of all time, with estimated worldwide sales of more than 220 million records. He is credited with popularizing hip hop in Middle America and is critically acclaimed as one of the greatest rappers of all time.
Eminem's global success and acclaimed works are widely regarded as having broken racial barriers for the acceptance of white rappers in popular music. While much of his transgressive work during the early 2000s made him hugely controversial, he came to be a representation of popular angst of the American underclass. He has been influential for many artists of various genres. After his debut album Infinite (1996) and the extended play Slim Shady EP (1997), Eminem signed with Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment and subsequently achieved mainstream popularity in 1999 with The Slim Shady LP. His next two releases The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and The Eminem Show (2002) were worldwide successes and were both nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. After the release of his next album, Encore (2004), Eminem went on hiatus in 2005 partly due to a prescription drug addiction. He returned to the music industry four years later with the release of Relapse (2009), and Recovery was released the following year. Recovery was the best-selling album worldwide of 2010, making it Eminem's second album, after The Eminem Show in 2002, to be the best-selling album of the year worldwide. In the following years, he released the US number one albums The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013), Revival (2017), Kamikaze (2018) and Music to Be Murdered By (2020).
Eminem made his debut in the film industry with the musical drama film 8 Mile (2002), playing a fictionalized version of himself, and his track "Lose Yourself" from its soundtrack won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, making him the first hip hop artist ever to win the award. Eminem has made cameo appearances in the films The Wash (2001), Funny People (2009), and The Interview (2014), and the television series Entourage (2010). He has also developed other ventures, including Shady Records, a joint venture with manager Paul Rosenberg, which helped launch the careers of artists such as 50 Cent, Yelawolf and Obie Trice, among others. He has also established his own channel, Shade 45, on Sirius XM Radio. In addition to his solo career, Eminem was a member of the hip hop group D12. He is also known for collaborations with fellow Detroit-based rapper Royce Da 5'9"; the two are collectively known as Bad Meets Evil.
He was the best-selling music artist in the United States of the 2000s and the best-selling male music artist in the United States of the 2010s, third overall. Billboard named him the "Artist of the Decade (2000–2009)". The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show, "Lose Yourself", "Love the Way You Lie" and "Not Afraid" have all been certified Diamond or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Rolling Stone has included him in its lists of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. He has won numerous awards, including 15 Grammy Awards, eight American Music Awards, 17 Billboard Music Awards, an Academy Award and an MTV Europe Music Global Icon Award. He has had ten number-one albums on the Billboard 200—which all consecutively debuted at number one on the chart, making him the only artist to achieve this—and five number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100.
I have never felt so much pain in my life. It was tough for me to even get out of bed and I had days when I couldn't walk, let alone write a rhyme.
Everybody has goals, aspirations or whatever, and everybody has been at a point in their life where nobody believed in them.
The truth is you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.
Hip-hop is universal now, it's all commercial now. It's like a circle full of circus clowns up in the circuit now.
I didn't have nothin' going for me, school, home, until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.
I'm certainly not a f**king fashion consultant. Don't call me if you want to know how to dress. I just rap. That's all I really know how to do.
It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right -- you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.
I'm an attention freak. I want all the women in the world, and if I don't get them, I fall to the ground and start kicking my feet.
You beef wit me, I'm-a even the score equally. Take you on Jerry Springer and beat your ass legally.
People will hate you for speaking the truth, but you've gotta learn to stand up to them, so don't be offended if I say something you don't like.
People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn't concentrate on my problem.
When you feel like you've had it up to here, and you're mad enough to scream, but you're sad enough to tear, that's rock bottom.
I've always respected what Wayne does, and Wayne, to me is definitely one of the greatest in the game right now.
I get imaginative with a mouth full of adjectives,
A brain full of adverbs, and a box full of laxatives,
Shittin' on rappers, causin' hospital accidents.
It was a slow process. You gotta remember I hadn't recorded a song sober in seven years. So it took me awhile to even feel like I could record a song sober.
It's a trip when people take sobriety for granted. Feeling trapped in my addiction and then getting sober -- you appreciate it so much more, because I didn't know if I would ever know what it's like to feel normal again, ever.
Infinite was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be, how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself. It was a growing stage. I felt like Infinite was like a demo that just got pressed up.
My songs can make you cry, take you by surprise at the same time, can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme.
We just kept moving back and forth because my mother never had a job. We kept getting kicked out of every house we were in. I believe six months was the longest we ever lived in a house.
Saving Private Ryan was probably the illest, sickest movie I've ever watched, and I didn't see anybody criticizing that one for violence.
Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds It's like adrenaline, the pain is such a sudden rush for me.
You can't control who likes you. If I got Backstreet Boy fans what am I supposed to do? Turn them away? Whoever likes my stuff, likes my stuff but just know Slim Shady is hip hop, I grew up on hip hop, it's the music I love and it's the music I respect. I respect the culture...that's me.
Slim Shady: Hotter then a set of twin babies
In a Mercedes Benz, with the windows up
When the temp goes up to the mid 80's.
Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know, I've written a whole song in an hour.
I try to keep it positive and play it cool, shoot up the playground and tell the kids to stay in school.
Follow me and do exactly what the song says
Smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people
And drink and jump behind the wheel like it was still legal.
I'm not afraid, to take a stand
Everybody come take my hand.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
I'm not afraid to take a stand. Everybody come take my hand. We'll walk this road together, through the storm. Whatever weather, cold or warm. Just let you know that, you're not alone. Holla if you feel that you've been down the same road.
I would love it if, even for one day, you could walk through a neighborhood and see an Asian guy sitting on his stoop, then you look across the street and see a black guy and a white guy sitting on their porches, and a Mexican dude walking by.
You don't wanna go eggin' him on. It'll never be my chair that your on, crown so tight that it cuts off circulation to the brain no oxygen. Other words there's no heir to the throne.
But you lied again. Now you get to watch her leave out the window. Guess that's why they call it 'window pane.
I don't know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.
I was born a premature birth.
My first words were bleep, bleep and Curse, Curse
My breath still stinks and I'm on my 3rd cert.
My English teacher wanted to have sex with me in Junior High. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy. I smacked him in his face with an eraser, chased him with a stapler and stapled his nuts to a stack of papers.
Since age twelve, I've felt like I'm someone else,'cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt.
If we can hump dead animals and antelopes, there's no reason that a man and another man can't elope.
What are friends? Friends are people you think are your friends but they really your enemies, with secret identities.
You better lose yourself in the music, the moment You own it, you better never let it go You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.
Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity. To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment. Would you capture it or just let it slip?
When I say I'll murder my baby's mother, maybe I wanted to but I didn't. Anybody who takes it literally is 10 times sicker than I am.
Rap was always a pipe dream for me, but rap was all I had. Because really, what was I going to do with my life? I had a young daughter. Kim and I were always either getting evicted or our house was getting shot up or robbed.
They say that love is powerful as cough syrup and Styrofoam.
All I know is I fell asleep and woke up in that Monte Carlo
With the ugly Kardashian...
Lamar, oh, sorry. Yo, we done both set the bar low.
Certainly I'm not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I'm a sponge. I've always been a sponge.
I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I'm not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I'm going to do something, I have to do it.
A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I'm learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, 'I can't go to Kmart. I can't take my kids to the haunted house.'
I want to keep making records as long as I can, but I don't know how long you can be taken seriously in rap.
There was a while when I was feeling like, 'Damn, if I'd just been born black, I would not have to go through all this'.
If there's not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.
Before I was famous, when I was just working in Gilbert's Lodge, everything was moving in slow motion.
You know, not to sound corny or nuthin', but I felt like a fighter comin' up, man. I felt like, you know, I'm being attacked for this reason or that reason, and I gotta fight my way through this.
I always try to be smart. I try to treat all the money I'm making like it's the last time I'm going to make it.
Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn't say I lived in a ghetto; I'd say I lived in the 'hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.
When Bugs Bunny walks into rehab, people are going to turn and look. People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn't concentrate on my problem.
People can try to reinvent themselves. I don't think you can really change who you are, though, because who you are is pretty much where you came from and what you've done up to now.
A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I'm joking and when I'm serious.
You're not going to say anything about me that I'm not going to say about myself. There's so many things that I think about myself; if someone really wanted to get at me, they could say this and this and this. So I'm going to say it before they can. It's the best policy for me.
To the people I forgot, you weren't on my mind for some reason and you probably don't deserve any thanks anyway.
When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.
It sometimes feels like a strange movie, you know, it's all so weird that sometimes I wonder if it is really happening.
Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it's like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can't really speak on it, because I wasn't there. I don't feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.
It's kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else's hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.
Hip-hop saved my life, man. It's the only thing I've ever been even decent at. I don't know how to do anything else.
I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I'm going through or what's going on in my life at that moment.
Hip-hop is ever changing but you'll always have the pack. And you'll always have those people who are separated from the pack.
I don't even know how to speak up for myself, because I don't really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice.
Longer Version/[Notes]:
I don't even know how to speak up for myself, because I don't really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice. And if you're always the new kid, you never get a chance to adapt, so your confidence is just zilch.
Personally, I just think rap music is the best thing out there, period. If you look at my deck in my car radio, you're always going to find a hip-hop tape; that's all I buy, that's all I live, that's all I listen to, that's all I love.
Trust is hard to come by. That's why my circle is small and tight. I'm kind of funny about making new friends.
You know, fame is a funny thing, man, especially, you know, actors, musicians, rappers, rock singers, it's kind of a lifestyle and it's easy to get caught up in it -- you go to bars, you go to clubs, everyone's doing a certain thing... It's tough.
Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They're only powerful when you got your back turned.
If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible as long as you keep working at it and don't back down.
There was certainly, like, a rebellious, like, youthful rage in me. And there was also the fact of no getting away from fact that I am white, and you know, this is predominantly black music, you know.
