I make music cuz it's almost like I can escape everything I was involved in. All I gotta do is make music. I don't do nothin but make music.

I had to overcome challenge after challenge in order to take my life from nothing to living my dreams.

The competitive nature of hip-hop culture has always had battling involved with it. So you battle with the other artist but not necessarily in business and everywhere else.

The greatest fear people have is that of being themselves. They want to be 50 Cent or someone else. They do what everyone else does even if it doesn’t fit where and who they are. But you get nowhere that way; your energy is weak and no one pays attention to you. You’re running away from the one thing that you own – what makes you different. I lost that fear. And once I felt the power that I had by showing the world I didn’t care about being like other people, I could never go back.

I'd like to connect with music like I did in the beginning. To have that intensity again, to have a song that comes on at 1 o'clock in the morning and it's the premiere song at that point. It's almost magic because, when you condition for it, it doesn't take long for you to write the content that everyone in the world can agree on at one time.

Either you are a victim or you victimize someone and in the hood it's no holds barred. The kid in the schoolyard that doesn't want to fight always leaves with a black eye.

I can't have a lot of people around me all the time. It really bugs me out that I have that many people. I need to be by myself.