You are who you associate with. Look around at your five closest friends and that's who you are. If you don't want to be that person, you know what you gotta do.

Read more learn more, change the globe

No matter where you're from - you can be Native American, Italian, Jewish, Latino, African-American - whatever you are, we're all distant relatives.

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.

Africa has been going through so much for so many years; it's time that it stands up the way other nations are standing up.

I've been lucky enough to reach a place where I can speak what's in my heart, and people know that it comes from a real place; I don't have to worry about doing what someone's not doing - I can do me.

I can't control what people think. They know who I am.