This younger generation that's around, that's tweeting, Facebooking and Vine-ing, the fans appreciate that because they feel like they can get to you.

The day Rick Ross dives into the crowd, is the day we find out who his true fans are.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it'll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

My main goal is to be a self-made man and have control over what's mine.

I never thought in a million years that I'd ever sell out back-to-back shows at The Garden. That's not to say, I never expected my career to take off. Still, it was a "Pinch Me, Wake Me Up" moment. I was like, "Wow! I can't believe this. That I'm actually here, and this is actually happening." And in that moment, when I was about to thank my fans for supporting me, I noticed that they were standing up clapping. It was overwhelming, and became a very emotional moment when I tried to thank them.

I get that racism exists, but it's not a catalyst for my content. I don't need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with 'topics' - race, white versus black - you're not separating from the pack. You're doing what everybody else is doing.

I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.