“And through doing that I realised that actually these stories were very visual in my head and I couldn’t wait to make the videos.”

So, I really enjoyed doing the Strickland Banks album. But there’s no point in my trying to release underground hip-hop music on a major label. That part of my talent, or part of my art, had to live somewhere else and feature film was the perfect vehicle for it.

With hip-hop music, it allowed me to talk about political and social things but also to tell stories.

I love the way I make hip-hop and I refuse to make pop-rap. I don’t refuse to make mainstream music, which is why I did a soul record. There was no reason why soul music couldn’t get played on the radio and I still wanted to have a relationship with my record label.

Anyone who puts 110% into their work deserves as much success as they can get.

I found very early on when I became a hip-hop artist that I loved telling stories. Actually, when I was trying to get a message across it was more powerful when I told a story, rather than if I used a metaphor or if I preached about an issue.

I was a soul singer first and I’d write love songs. I find with soul music it’s really hard to write about anything else. But I was 15 at the time when I was doing that and, to be honest, I’d never experienced love, so the words were kind of meaningless.

I didn’t make a film because I wanted a starring role. I made a film because I wanted to tell a story and I wanted to prove that I could direct.

The problem with working with a record label is they maybe a song I want to make a video for that they will refuse to make a video for because they don’t see that song as a single. And I found that very frustrating.

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

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.

Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction.

Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

How happy it is to believe, with a steadfast assurance, that our petitions are heard even while we are making them; and how delightful to meet with a proof of it in the effectual and actual grant of them.