“When you’re accustomed to wealth, you don’t show it, right? That’s why the white kids in school could wear bummy sneakers; it’s almost like, ‘Don’t show wealth – that’s crass.’”

I have no idea what my teacher’s intentions were – whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.

The experiences that I’ve had growing up with music, you know, I couldn’t trade them for any money in the world. Dancing in the living room to enjoy myself. ‘Enjoy Yourself,’ Michael Jackson.

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.

Truly, one gets easier accustomed to a silken bed than to a sack of leaves.

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

All parts of the body which have a function, if used in moderation and exercised in labors in which each is accustomed, become thereby healthy, well developed and age more slowly, but if unused they become liable to disease, defective in growth and age quickly.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

And I had long ago become accustomed to being called ‘Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

The public is accustomed to it, expects little from it and therefore takes little notice of it.

Being points beyond itself. Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression “being points beyond itself” may be taken to denote a higher point in space.