The emotionally intelligent person is skilled in four areas: identifying emotions, using emotions, understanding emotions, and regulating emotions.

I was very successful from a very early age, and I want to keep it.

Stop falling in love with everything that lets you down, even if your hands are shaking and your faith is broken, even as the eyes are closing, do it with a heart wide open. Say what you need to say.

There's a real self-serving element to hip-hop that threatens its life span.

I don't jerk off because I'm horny. I'm sort of half-chick. It's like District 9. I can fire alien weapons. I can insert a tampon. No, I do it because I want to take a brain bath. It's like a hot whirlpool for my brain, in a brain space that is 100 percent agreeable with itself.

I can't describe it in words, but I can see it in my head, its color, its light, its shapes, and I've managed to synthesize my love for myself by way of many different reasonings and processes, and I've been able to really synthesize my own satisfaction and things that do it for me. They've usually been self-taught, self-instructed, self-refined. So to be with anybody else has to somewhat lie in that comfort zone I've created with myself so well.

Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind.