I just feel like, with rappers, there's so much complacency. It's like, 'Oh, I'm a rapper. I'm successful. I make money. That's all that matters.' But there's a lot of stuff going on in the world. Whether or not you're aware of it, it's happening.

I want people to follow their dreams, yes but I'm not interested in telling young black kids how to be rappers I want to show them that there's so many other paths you can take, besides a rapper or basketball player.

When I first started rapping, when I switched my style to more like a punch line style - this is when I'm like 13 years old - and I switched it to this real wordy - I was trying to rap like Canibus and like Eminem. It was real lyrical, real wordy and punch lines and, when I would come up with these punch lines and spit 'em in these cyphers, the minute the cyphers would be like, "Ohhh" and everybody would break away, it was a new feeling for me. It was like, "Oh, yo, you see what I just did?" I was addicted to that feeling, and I still love that feeling.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn't going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I've ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn't want to do whatever he did.

Barack Obama would not be President if he were dark skin. You know what I mean? That's just the truth. I might not be as successful as I am now if I was dark skin.

I'm a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that's never healthy.

I was a super-duper Tupac fan, and I realized later, when I became a huge Nas fan and a huge Eminem fan, I was drawn to the storytellers. They all told stories in different ways, but they were all like the best storytellers.