Iggy Azalea quotes: the big booty rapper reflects on her career so far.
“Keep on living, keep on breathing, even when you don’t believe it. Keep on climbing, keep on reaching, even when this world can’t see it.”
“Really good things take time to grow. Foundation is not built overnight.”
“I don’t really sit around thinking ‘if only I could delete that one thing.’ You know, you’ve gotta move forward and have personal growth. I don’t really think much about that.”
“Pledge allegiance to the struggle.”
“I never learned to fail, all I know is win.”
“I’m irrational about all things creative. They say I’m insane because I need to have so much creative control. They say I’m unmanageable, but I’m not. I just know what I like. I’m obsessed with it. If you can’t control it, that’s like having somebody else paint your pictures. How could you do that? I never could.”
“Once you go great, you never go good. You never go back, even if you could.”
“I watch what is going on, because it’s important – no matter what it is you’re doing, if you’re rapping or working in an office – it’s important to keep an eye on what is happening around you. So I watch what’s going on and what people like, but I never want to try to copy that. I still want to be original and have a sound that’s true to me. So for me, I listen to what’s happening or what’s changing sonically, and then I just try to incorporate something that’s organic to me.”
“I like to pay attention and then figure out: how do I fit into this world organically?”
“I’ve always known that I’m controversial. I love to move the needle.”
“Sometimes you have to learn the hard way.”
“There’s a difference between being yourself and being your stereotype.”
“First thing’s first, I’m the realest.”
“No one can break me down. I know my worth and it’s a beautiful thing.”
“I always say: ‘Share your happiness with the world, give other people that happiness and let it come back,’ but some things make me question it. I don’t know if I want some people to know that I am happy. I think a lot of people want to take it away from you, and that’s really scary.”
“There’s an obligation to not lead people down the wrong path.”
“I think that everybody has something that people like or that’s great about them.”
“Music is art to me, and you don’t censor art. You don’t go into a museum and censor things.”
“It’s not easy to make a song that the whole world relates to, and to do it over and over again. When I got in the studio I realized this is really, really hard. It’s easy to do whatever the hell you want to do but everybody can’t connect to that.”
“For me, visuals are as important as the music. I just love escapism and giving people something to escape to. To me, that’s what art is.”
“I think music talks to you on an emotional level, regardless of where you’re from. I guess I related to the tempo of rap, the aggressiveness.”
“I started rapping since, like, 14. But I’ve been obsessed with rap from when I was 11.”
“I always felt really alone because no one wanted to talk about the things that I enjoyed, and that was really rap music and hip-hop as a culture. You know, having the shoes, using the words, buying the magazines, seeing the videos. And I had nobody to share it with, so I feel like I lived a lot online.”
“I was insanely confident, with the kind of deluded grandeur that I think you need when no else believes in you. I thought I was good at it even though in retrospect I was bad still. I was about 14 and that’s when I started writing music. From 14 to 16, that’s when the plan formed. As soon as I started writing, I knew music was what I had to do. Even if I wasn’t a rapper, I thought I could be a sound engineer or a writer. I just knew I wanted to be involved in music. And I knew I had to get the f*ck out of where I lived. It was suffocating me. I wanted to live in a place where the sky was the limit, a place where my dreams weren’t strange or weird, where others had even crazier ideas than me. I knew all of that was in America, and that’s where I had to go and that’s where I thought people were going to accept my wild thoughts.”
“Hip-hop is what inspired me to move to America and pursue my dreams, and it’s what helped me when I was a teenager to escape and to get through my life and to better times.”
“I was in Atlanta for nearly two years just writing for people. I was doing so many writers camps for other known artists, just trying to get my spot.”
“I honestly don’t really mind if I’m described as rap or pop. My passion is purely making music and entertaining. It’s my passion – I don’t really have a choice.”
“I think this validates that I’m on the right path.”
“Not every artist is a role model.”
“At the very worst, if I have a short-lived career, at least I could say I sparked a change – that I inspired some leniency in what people accept in hip-hop. And if I have a very long career and can be gyrating in a leotard at 35, that would be great.”
“‘Iggy’ was my dog – he was named after Iggy Pop – and ‘Azalea’ is the street where I grew up; together, they have the right amount of syllables to make the perfect name.”
“I hated school so bad. I only liked art class during high school. I was always smart.”
“I really love art. Not just photography or cinematography. I just like visual art and visual things. I grew up in a very rural area, so I really spent a lot of my childhood playing outside and being imaginative, but also watching movies and looking at books. Art and drawing were my hobbies. I spent so much of my childhood escaping and imagining the different worlds or different places that seemed so far away from where I grew up.”
“I naturally want to be provocative.”
“They build me up to break me down – it builds me up again. Even when I’m gone, they gonna pay to see where I’ve been.”
“I really wish there was more of an infrastructure within the music industry to make sure that the artists have people they can go to. Like physical therapists in sports. The teams have people looking out for players, that make sure they’re okay in every element, and the music business doesn’t have that – they just throw you out there. You get used to it and you’re still successful, but it’s a lot to deal with.”
“I think when you have mainstream success and you rocket launch into the spotlight, you aren’t really prepared for a lot of the things that come with that. You can find yourself really putting your foot in your mouth a lot. When you combine that with the fact that you’re 23, 24 years old… a lot of things change in your late 20s. You’re maturing and growing up and becoming an adult.”
“Before it was like, ‘We’re at the top of the mountain, and we have to stay at the top.’ I slid down the mountain a bit.”
“And I’m not new to the industry anymore. I’m thinking a lot more heavily about what I say, what the repercussions of that may be, and being more responsible. It’s not that I go out of my way not to say anything or be quiet, I think that it’s just that when you really think about what you want to say, you might have less that comes out of your mouth. Because when you’re just yapping, you could have a bit of verbal diarrhea.”
“I think I have verbal diarrhea in life in general. When you’re younger, you think you know everything about everything. As you grow up, you figure out that you don’t. So I think sometimes as you get older, it’s funny because you know more, but you almost have less of an opinion than when you’re younger because you’re like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t have information, can I really give an educated opinion about this?’ So you find yourself having less to say or maybe you can say more with less, you know?”
“I have regrets, yes, tons, of course – anybody’s gonna – so many regrets. But I don’t beat myself up about it at the same time, because it, everything, was like landing on Mars. I just think it’s a lot for anybody to digest.”
“In the way anybody looks back on life: there are moments that I loved, and there are moments where I cringe. I think it’s as simple as an outfit you wore at a party… or like when you’re grown up and you look back at your college days. You look back at it with love, and there are other things you were like, ‘Oh God, I was such an idiot.’”
“When you have success as a pop artist it makes the label a lot of money, so they pushed me to keep churning out hits. They pushed for more branding money, more endorsements – that’s their job. And I made the conscious choice to go along with it because I was making a lot of f*cking money.”
“I’m happy. I know my fans want me to rap and I want to give them that. I want to give them the hard sh*t that they love, the sh*t that’s different, that moves the needle. I hope people will support it.”
“When you become mega successful and you go mainstream, no longer is the sky the limit. It becomes, ‘Oh she’s mainstream, she’s had a Steve Madden deal, she’s on Cosmo,’ and the art becomes dissected in a new way with more eyes. But I like it. Sonically, when I’m in the studio, it’s fun approaching music as a new artist. F*ck what I was doing before, I’m doing new sh*t. It’s exciting.”
“I always hope for the best, but I think there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to hope for anything too big because I don’t want to be let down and this is more than I could have hoped for.”
“I feel like I’m always learning and getting better. I think I could do better and I want to do my best.”
“To see brands that I knew, magazines, all of these mainstream fixtures, people, and media embrace my music, I never could have dreamed that.”
“Luxury lives in the finer details. It’s a cloth napkin at a dinner table. It’s a mint on your pillow before bed.”
“I’m not going to go anywhere. I’m going to get my glory. I’m going to get my shine.”
“Life’s a trip and baby you the plane.”
Related: Rihanna quotes.
