While silly ni**as argue over who gon' snatch the crown / Look around my ni**a, white people have snatched the sound / This year I'll probably go to the awards dappered down / Watch Iggy win a Grammy as I try to crack a smile.

When composing music, I just start spilling things out and then wait until they take form, you know what I mean, until I see like a common thread or something.

I feel like relationships are a beautiful thing, period. Relationships can be really beautiful, they can be really hard, they can be really rewarding, or they can be bad relationships where it's really detrimental and hurtful, but that's life, period.

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 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.

As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I'm successful, I never feel like I'm anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I'm never content.

I didn't even have to be a big fan of someone to enjoy hearing them speak. I remember when Nikki Giovanni came - I wasn't really familiar with her. But she said some things I'll never forget. Like, okay, for example, she was talking about the amount of beef that's in the world. There are so many McDonald's, Burger Kings, Wendy's.