I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.

You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.

I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.

Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves.

I think hip-hop can be prophetic and progressive, and at the same time, the dominant forms tend to be homophobic, misogynistic and something that we need to critically call into question.

In that chocolate side of town, in my blessed city of Sacramento, California - that was beginning of my death shudders, that's why Kierkegaard and Kafka began to make sense to me when I was very, very young - that radical sense fragility of life and inevitability of death; those trucks coming, if the truck came at a same time I was on the bridge, I was in the creek -my body would be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.