Lemon Andersen Quotations

I'm a half-breed. You know, I'm Puerto Rican and Norwegian from descent, and I grew up, born and raised in New York City, and I stood out amongst my friends in my community. I was very blond-haired, white, and 'Lemonhead' was the name that they gave me.

I'm a suspicious mulatto, which means I'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right.

I live by the code 'Kill them with kindness, blood everywhere;' for me, it's always about being the nicest kind of guy.

It's all about the mood I'm in and the scene I'm writing. 'Cause work controls my life, writing controls my life, performing controls my life. So I don't listen to any music that's not an influence on what I'm working on that day. Music is a big influence in my work and sometimes drives the energy of where I want to go.

I talk to my kids about my mother's energy and how she would have loved them. I talk about how kind and polite my father was. So that they have some kind of remembrance that even though my parents died from their addictions and so that they know they were genuine in how they were.

I was in juvenile detention center, and I was in Rikers Island. And there was an anthology written by the inmates called 'The Pen,' and I - you know, I had a crush on a girl, and she left me when I was incarcerated. And I found this poem in this anthology that talked about having your heart broken and being incarcerated.

The pen isn’t really the weapon - the work ethic is the weapon.

[My] hunger and thirst was, and still remains: How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?

[I've] learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body.

Work controls my life, writing controls my life, performing controls my life.