It hurts to see anybody in pain, if you've got any kind of heart.

You don't want to disappoint. Especially someone like me who's been out of music for years and hasn't had an album in like, four years.

The greatest sin is fear and giving up.

I want you to know who I am: what the streets taste like, feel like, smell like. What the cops talk like, walk like, think like. What crackheads do - I wanted you to smell it, feel it. It was important to me that I told the story that way because I thought that it wouldn't be told if I didn't tell it.

The Internet made the world smaller, so it's easier for people to hear your music. You don't necessarily need a radio record.

I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it.

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.