When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

Mostly every form of American music is dead. It's been dead. R&B isn't really good. You got a handful of great guys - Ne-Yo, R. Kelly, Usher. You have a handful of great female artists. But for the most part the music world's changing and change is good. You have to make adjustments if you want to survive in that world. You start to thinking about creative moments - bliss. When everything was all good. You realize that in comparison to the way hip-hop started off, where we should be at right now is not there.

Anybody I'm dating, I don't want them to talk about my music. I don't talk about my music to them.

New York city is full of great spaces. The best spaces of the world are here. This is the new Europe, where the settlers came and busted out their ideas and put it down so there's nothing but great space in this great city.

I had a pretty public divorce. They're not easy - divorces - and it took me a long time to really get through.

You ni**az get me sick, wannabe soundin like you know my arithmetic... but we don't sound alike

I think hip-hop could help rebuild America, once hip-hoppers own hip-hop... We are our own politicians, our own government, we have something to say. We're warriors. Soldiers.