I'm trying to get low. People's personalities can get in the way of their own work.

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

I was taught when there's somethin' you can change around keep quiet, you got nothin' to complain about.

We can be beautiful and feel beautiful about who we are everyday.

There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music.

If 'Life in Marvelous Times' can't get on the radio, then I don't need to be on the radio.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.