“Working with great people makes you great; you learn a lot and it also gives you the experience and confidence to move on with your own career.”

There was a side of me that knew I was gonna change the game, but I didn’t know how many people would respect it.

Life Is Good’ represents the most beautiful, dramatic and heavy moments in my life.

I can’t control what people think. They know who I am.

I definitely have plans to do more collaboration albums in the future.

I wish the music business was a much easier thing, but you know what? Nothing easy is worth anything. So it is what it is.

I never cared for politics before Barack Obama. I never thought it mattered to people like me.

I think I’m that guy. I’m still blessed with the opportunity to make music and pass out a message like, ‘Life is good,’ to the world.

The sound of the ’90s, to me, is a combination of soul and street – it’s a feeling.

Hip-hop artists, especially the older ones, are the ones who knew hip-hop was a worldwide phenomenon before the mainstream caught on, so hip-hop artists are forward thinkers. We want to stay with the new.

DJs need to challenge us rappers. They got so much power, they need to challenge us.

I don’t know who I will collaborate with, but there’s a great chance of something happening.

My record company had to beg me to stop filmin’ music videos in the projects.

Africa has been going through so much for so many years; it’s time that it stands up the way other nations are standing up.

Once you make it to your point of making it, you’ll appreciate the struggle.

Somebody like me who knows it firsthand and could relate… I had a best friend killed, plenty other friends killed. I been through it. I seen it.

Stillmatic’ is the rebirth of ‘Illmatic,’ my first debut album to come out in 1994. ‘Stillmatic’ is me coming full circle in my career and with everything, and just bringing pure hip-hop back.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

In doing nothing men learn to do evil.

I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it

Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don’t learn.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

The best way of learning to be an independent sovereign state is to be an independent sovereign state.

A designer who is not also a couturier, who hasn’t learned the most refined mysteries of physically creating his models, is like a sculptor who gives his drawings to another man, an artisan, to accomplish.