“Biggie was the King Of New York as a rapper. There’s a lot more dangerous guys than Biggie Smalls out there, you know what I’m saying? John Gotti was way closer to King Of New York than him.”

If your dad died before you were born, yeah, it hurts – but it’s not like you had a connection with something that was real. Not to say it’s any better – but to have that connection and then have it ripped away was, like, the worst.

You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that’s from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.

Everyone knows I’m married; I just don’t discuss it. Because it’s a part of my life that I’d rather keep private… When your whole life is played out in front of everybody, for your sanity, you need parts that are just yours.

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.

Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

Mind: A beautiful servant, a dangerous master.

Success is always dangerous. It can make an asshole out of anybody.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

You know the trouble with real life? There’s no danger music.

The truth is a double-edged sword; it is a dangerous thing.

A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.

He is many things – dangerous and devious, cunning and deadly, a good friend and an implacable enemy – but he comes from an age when a man’s word was indeed precious.