::QUOTES::    

 "When I was 9 years old, my uncle put me on to the Breakin' soundtrack. The first rap song I ever heard was Ice-T, 'Reckless.' From L.L. to the Fat Boys, and all that shit, I was fascinated. When L.L. first came out with 'I'm Bad', I wanted to do it, to rhyme. Standing in front of the mirror, I wanted to be like L.L."

"I would never fucking put them (Beastie Boys) in a rhyme. I don't even want them wondering if I was trying to diss them. I got a lot of love for them. I grew up on that shit. The other rappers, whatever."

"My fans should take my music with a grain of salt."

"Anybody with a sense of humour is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end."

"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."

"I took a lot of them, I took a bunch of pain killers - Tylenol. I took 13, 16 of 'em and fuckin' threw 'em up. I thought I was going die, I thought I was going to die for real."

"Never take ecstasy, beer, baccardi, weed, pepto bismol, vivarin, tums, tagamet hb, xanax, and valium in the same day. It makes it difficult to sleep at night."

"Don't do drugs, don't have unprotected sex, don't be violent. Leave that to me."

"First of all, I want to thank everybody who could look through the controversy and see the album for what it was-and also for what it isn't".

"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'.

"I try not to look at it that way. Being white. I don't wake up every day and look in the mirror, 'Oh. I'm white'."

"Unless you want to fuck me, why do you care what I look like?"

"To all the people who never gave love, and continue to deny me 'cuz of what I look like: suck my dick you fucks! ! !"

"To the people I forgot, you weren't on my mind for some reason and you probably don't deserve any thanks anyway."

"My family has never been there for me. They expect things because we're blood."

"I don't want them (Britney Spears & Christina Aguilera) once they turn 18."

"My earliest memory was raping the babysitter when I was 5... she was 15."

"There were times when friends had to buy me fuckin' shoes!"

"Saving Private Ryan was probably the illest, sickest movie I've ever watched, and I didn't see anybody criticizing that one for violence."

"My father? I never knew him. Never even seen a picture of him."

"I mean I got jumped, fucked up shit happened to me a few times, but that happens to everybody. I don't think it has anything to do with color or any of that shit. It's just all a part of growing up."

"At this point, I'm like "Come up with something new." I hate the same old questions. But it seems like "white" magazines such as Spin and Rolling Stone focus on my "whiteness" more than Black magazines."

"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".

"There's a difference between realness and an act, and they're an act, and they know they're an act, and they even say they're an act, they even say they're cornballs, they admit it".

"It's funny how all the magazines can dwell on my race, but they could NEVER say that my shit is whack because they know my shit is tight!"

"I think my first album opened a lot of doors for me to push the freedom of speech to the limit."

"One thing I won't do is put out another song like 'My Name Is'", his breakthrough hit. "I can't stand that fucking song" he says. "This album is rawer. Fans looking for bubblegum rap aren't going to get it here."

"Look. I was pissed off! That's all I could say. I really felt that I wanted to do that shit. At one point in time, I really wanted to do that shit. For real."

"Some asshole kept throwing oranges and other fruit at me while I was onstage. Fucker had an arm like a major league pitcher..."

"I had too much NyQuil and Vivarin again. Lost my stomach all over the place."

"Sometimes I'm real cool, but sometimes I could be a real asshole. I think everyone is like that."

"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."

"It doesn't exactly feel like a shock, but it's all new to me, and I'm taking it in as it comes."

"A bunch of girls, swinging from a nice chandelier, landing on top of me naked...while I lay in a pool of steaming hot water!"

"I was takin' a shit. I swear to God. And the fuckin' name just popped into my head. Then I started thinkin' of twenty million things that rhymed with it."

"Slim Shady is just the evil thoughts that come into my head. Things I shouldn't be thinking about. Not to be gimmicky, but people should be able to determine when I'm serious and when I'm fuckin around. That's why a lot of my songs are funny. I got a warped sense of humor I guess."

"I felt like it's my time to shine, I have to rip this. At that time, I felt that it was a life or death situation."

"I'm not alone in feeling the way I feel. I believe that a lot of people can relate to my shit whether white, black, it doesn't matter. Everybody has been through some shit, whether it's drastic or not so drastic. Everybody gets to the point of 'I don't give a fuck'."

"It was an honor to hear the words out of Dre's mouth that he liked my shit. Growing up, I was one of the biggest fans of N.W.A, from putting on the sunglasses and looking in the mirror and lipsinking, to wanting to be Dr. Dre, to be Ice Cube. This is the biggest hip-hop producer 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."

"I had nothing to lose, but something to gain. If I made an album for me and it was to my satisfaction, then I succeeded. If I didn't, then my producers were going to give up on the whole rap thing we were doing. I made some shit that I wanted to hear. The Slim Shady EP, I lashed out on everybody who talked shit about me."

"I do say things that I think will shock people. But I don't do things to shock people. I'm not trying to be the next Tupac, but I don't know how long I'm going to be on this planet. So while I'm here, I might as well make the most of it."

"I grew up listening to 2 Live Crew and N.W.A. and I never went out and shot nobody."

"I do promote violence and I don't give a fuck."

"I don't like rap anyways, I'm just trying to get my porno career started."

"I hate bitches. (One) fucked up, and it made me look at girls as sluts."

"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."

"I had this whole Slim Shady concept of being two different people, having two different sides of me. One of them I was trying to let go, and I looked at the mirror and smashed it. That was the whole intro of the Slim Shady EP. Slim Shady was coming to haunt me, was coming to haunt Eminem."

"If I said in one of my songs that my English teacher wanted to have sex with me in junior high, all I'm saying, is that I'm not gay, you know? People confuse the lyrics for me speaking my mind. I don't agree with that lifestyle, but if that lifestyle is for you, then it's your business."

"I don't like to give the sob story: growing up in a single-parent home, never knew my father, my mother never worked, and when friends came over I'd hide the welfare cheese. Yo, I failed ninth grade three times, but I don't think it was necessarily 'cause I'm stupid. I didn't go to school. I couldn't deal."