At the end of the day, I don't release any records that I'm not proud to put my name on. I never got to that point.

Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

I think all of this—The Roots and DJing included—was meant to prepare me for The Tonight Show.

Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.

Jay-Z is a dude that can give you a hundred 'Simpsons' quotes, like, 'What you know about the monorail?'

Switching off perfection switched on the human quality

Half the time, my job is basically to talk people off the ledge. It's more psychological than just me picking up some sticks and counting, "1, 2, 3, 4."