“Hip-hop is really standoffish. It’s really competitive and it’s really about who’s number one all the time. Sometimes it gets out of hand.”

I don’t go out unless I’m working. My quality time is when I’m doing nothing.

I like the way hip-hop is now. It’s grown up enough so that it can get involved with politics if it feels like it.

My fun is not doing the easy work. My fun is doing what’s me.

I think I’ve had the longest career of strength, focus, and still being able to sell records.

You don’t know anything about respect; you don’t know anything about being faithful and loyal to your girlfriend.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat.

You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.

All fatherhood is very important because single mothers shouldn’t have to raise sons or daughters; they need that help.

I’m a big fan of Common. I’m a big fan of Scarface; I’m a big fan of so many people, from Jeezy to… well, there are a lot of people’s music that I respect.

I never stood for any president in my life, never voted, before Barack Obama. It changed my life to vote. It starts there with me.

DJs play a big responsibility of what hip-hop is doing… At the end of the day, it’s up to us to control and to own hip-hop.

I don’t get jealousy, I don’t get how people hate each other – I never did.

I have no tattoos that I regret – I have had some that I have had changed according to how my life was.

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.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

I took his suggestion to heart and went from a “know-it-all” to a “learn-it-all.”

I’ve always believed that dreams were both the love letters and the hate mail of the subconscious.

Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession – but beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart – I have all these things – aren’t taken away but grow! Increase with the years!

Nobody sees anybody truly, but all through the flaws of their own ego.

In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.

In fact, for all kinds of offenses – and, for no offenses – from murders to misdemeanors, men and women are put to death without judge or jury; so that, although the political excuse was no longer necessary, the wholesale murder of human beings went on just the same.