“I grew up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and my mom and pop had an extensive record collection, so Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and all of those sounds and souls of Motown filled the house.”

I think reviews have lost a lot of their importance now because of the Internet; everyone is experiencing things at the same time.

I feel like with the history of this platform, from vinyl to where we are now, it just seems like the next logical step.

Everyone who makes music is a good collaborator at their foundation because in order to make music, you have to connect to it in a way that other people can’t.

I’m going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.

Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out.

My mom always taught me – you know, little boys listen to their moms too much – that whatever you put into something is what you’re going to get out of it.

I was an artist, I was executive producer on my first album, so I’ve always had to manage both. I couldn’t get a record deal. It wasn’t by choice – I couldn’t get a record deal, so I had to figure it out.

I have inherited two of the most important brands in hip-hop, Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella. Reid and Universal Music Group have given me the opportunity to manage the companies I have contributed to my whole career. I feel this is a giant step for me and the entire artist community.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

I’ve got a nice collection of paintings – a Basquiat, a black-and-white Warhol that’s like a Rorschach test, and I commissioned Takashi Murakami to do a ten-foot joint for me. It’s almost like the explosion in Hiroshima with his famous skeleton head. There’s a wall above my fireplace reserved for it.

We were living in a tough situation, but my mother managed; she juggled. Sometimes we’d pay the light bill, sometimes we paid the phone, sometimes the gas went off.

I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice – anything just to get a paper bag. And I’d write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook.

I’m a mirror. If you’re cool with me, I’m cool with you, and the exchange starts. What you see is what you reflect. If you don’t like what you see, then you’ve done something. If I’m standoffish, that’s because you are.

Around 20. I’d been trying to transition from the streets to the music business, but I would make demos and then quit for six months. And I started to realize that I couldn’t be successful until I let the street life go.

The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden.

I was talking about in slang, and it was something that people in the music business was not really privy to. They didn’t understand totally what I was saying or what I was talking about.

This country collects too many tongues, until our only language is silence.

In time of sickness the soul collects itself anew.

My favorite days are the ones where I deal only with my own team, design, marketing, working on the next accessories collection.

You have to go the rounds from individual to individual in order to gather the totality of the race.

Movies are the work of a collective conscious. It takes 500-800 people on a movie to complete a vision.

What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.

Movies are a collective art. Art by proxy.

We don’t, as a collective life on this planet, all get groovy together or all sink into ignorance together. One by one we liberate our souls, our individual souls, from the cycle by our own realizations.