I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up.

[In Eritrea] in key positions - president, government, police - everybody's the same [color]. It's a country run by its people. No racial class, everybody feels a part of it.

If you 35, 28, or 30 years old, and you decide you're gonna pick up a rag and start bangin', and you can look yourself in the mirror and you still feel like you're a man? That's cool, do your thing.

I never thought my granny, somebody that was born down South, who witnessed America when it was segregated, would see, in her lifetime, an African-American in office as the President of the United States. It's major, it's a real historic day.

In all honesty, based on the direction my life was heading in before I got a real break in the music sh*t, I'm not gonna say I would be one hundred percent in a negative direction, but I know that I would still be in the streets, so if it wasn't for the music bein' my outlet, I'd probably be hustlin', I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to go and get a nine-to-five, I never finished high school or none of that.

On a mission your worst enemy is idle time.

I kinda came into my manhood, or what I thought was my adulthood, early. I had to show up, and I had to make sure I had gas money, food money, rent money, clothes money - everything was on me, startin' at that age, so that's what led me to start hustlin', that's what led me to start to try to find ways to fend for myself. And once I did that, I was full-time, bein' in the street, and, bein' in the street, it's cold. It's the way the streets operate, and you have to adapt to that.