Stay in your lane. If you're good enough, people will move to you.

Suffering will always be there. You'll always have the poor. You have to own your own progress. It is true that because of the economy and the fear factor the president [Barack Obama] is able to execute a lot of promises that it would be difficult to deliver it not for the fear factor. It's funny. He's delivering on what he promised and we call it fear.

Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.

I have 2 million Twitter followers. Some of those people are also yogis and activists and people who really go out and make a difference. I do as much as I can with my voice. It's effortless in some cases. I try to remind everybody that they have that kind of voice.

I try to use my voice. I know that celebrity is valuable, and people do listen.

I think that's what made rap such a stable footprint in culture, that it's so honest.

The poets who do this are uniquely conscious of this silence, this stillness.