“I’ll listen to certain things that I made back then, and I’m like, ‘I wish I could have done this, I would’ve done that’. When you start out making music, you just want to make something that people will like.”

I think it’s good that YouTube decided that they really want to showcase Black talent.

An outside party don’t ever stay outside.

If you tell somebody that you make music they’re all interested. But when you say you rap, they just start rolling their eyes at you. It would’ve taken me a lot longer to get my foot in the door if I’d continued rapping all the way.

I know when it comes to the actual narrative of my solo music, it’s its own thing. That’s why I went out of my way after ‘Crew’ to not do a bunch of collaborations.

I feel you gotta be nervous. If you’re nervous, it’s just ’cause you want to do well, it’s not ’cause you’re scared.

Being old didn’t seem like an accomplishment. Everyone I knew who was old was like sick or broke. It just didn’t look appealing until I moved to L.A. and started interacting with people who were 50+ and still kicking it, having money, living large.

I started off making beats when I was like 12. Then when I linked with people who make beats full time, I was like, ‘Bet, now I can focus on writing and singing.’

I was reading Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’. It’s one of my favourites.

Me and Goldlink have known of each other for a minute and our managers know each other so they set up a studio session. When we got in the studio, we was cool; we’re from the same area so we have a lot in common.

In order for people to take what you say seriously, they have to know who you are as a person.

Before anything, I wanted to be a rapper. I used to make beats and I would start singing to layer my beats and that’s kind of how I realized I could sing.

I feel like any way you can get the message to resonate, I’m all for it.

I still got bars, I just use ’em differently. I’d say I’m a better singer than I am a rapper at this point because I’ve been sharpening my sword.

Music is my one opportunity to let out how I’m feeling when I’m not talking to a chick or my mom, you know what I mean? It’s just venting.

There’s the hype stuff that people love for five minutes and then there’s the stuff that changes cultures and shifts how you look at music. And then there’s that rare point where that hype stuff changes the game.

You work on something for so long that you become numb to it. Like, you don’t even know how to listen to it because you listened to it so many times.

I saw for the first time the earth’s shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. The feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.

We ought even to hold as a fixed principle that what I see white I believe to be black, if the superior authorities define it to be so.

We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else’s eyes, it’s like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

It could have been worse. I could have been born black.

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop–you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.