“But even creeps deserve to live someplace halfway decent.”
“I'm an independent thinker. And I'm not the poster child for any movement. I'm trying to support whatever's right no matter where it is.”
“I'm trying to get low. People's personalities can get in the way of their own work.”
“If you're going to do Chuck Berry, you got to, you know, go all out, and the duck walk is just kind of you know, cursory. That's like standing.”
“There are a lot of people who call themselves teachers or leaders, but they're really just propagandists.”
“You have to be an extremist to believe that you're gonna be the president of the United States and your name is Barack Hussein Obama! And he's using extreme methods, but his application is very smooth. Michelle Obama is extreme, her presence is extreme. And it's an extreme good. Extreme is not negative.”
“I believe the projects were a social experiment; we were laboratory rats stacked on top of each other, and people just knew, inherently, that there was something wrong. There's not a lot of regard for the property by the residents.”
“In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.”
“It's possible and available to any artist to be himself or herself on their own terms, to be accepted and embraced by black people. You don't have to be a thug to get love from black people.”
“I feel like I was the only person who was capable of making this type of music in this type of way. I don't rap like nobody, I don't try to sound like nobody.”