“MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.”

I have a genuine love affair with my audience. When I’m on stage they’re not privileged to see me. It’s a privilege for me to see them.

They say military have the so-called ‘secret intelligence’ – this amount of intelligence must be very secret, since I’ve never seen any intelligent military person, nor I have seen any sense in the bloody stupid wars.

I’ll only retire in the day I should be dead and they have me buried, and some idiot spell over my casket some stupid gospel stuff.

I have a saying. ‘Never judge a book by its cover’. I say that because I don’t even know who Ozzy is. I wake up a new person every day.

What is this? It’s music to get a brain seizure by.

I knew it was time to get off of reality TV when someone asked me if I sang as well as acted.

By all accounts I should be dead! The abuse I put my body through: the drugs, the alcohol, the lifestyle I’ve lived the last 30 years!

When you’re young, you’re stupid. You do silly things.

Somebody said to me this morning, ‘To what do you attribute your longevity?’ I don’t know. I mean, I couldn’t have planned my life out better.

What is the world coming to?

I’m about caring, I’m about people, and I’m about entertaining people. I’m a family man. A husband. A father.

I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that’s OK – the bat had to get Ozzy shots.

Of all the things I’ve lost I miss my mind the most.

To be a liar, you’ve got to have a great memory, and I don’t have a memory.

Being sober on a bus is, like, totally different than being drunk on a bus.

I’ve been a lot of other things over the years, which we don’t really want to talk about.

We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England.

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 like to perform every once in a while for people who want to see me, and cut albums of music that is what I’m really about.

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

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.

By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper – my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.

My first album didn’t come out until I was 26.

Some people are attracted to vulnerability. From my very first album, I’ve been vulnerable. I’ve always given parts of me, parts of my life – good, bad, ugly. I’ve never put up this image as a super-thug. Also, some people just like the music.