Got some, dirt on my shoulder, could you brush it off for me?

You ain't gotta go to church to find your God.

Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.

So many people that I've seen can't get clean water. It's a crime.

I seen the worst of the worst. I deserve every blessing I receive I'm from the dirt.