I ask people what piece they are on the chessboard. And some people say 'I'm the king' or 'I'm the knight.' And then they ask me what piece I am, and I say, 'I'm no piece. I take the position of God.'

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.

Experience is the best teacher. But in our day and time, what we need is wisdom, because wisdom overcomes experience, because experience is wisdom, but there's a level of wisdom that overcomes the experience, and that's the experience that's already lived by others. I'm not trying to repeat the histories. I already learned from what they did.

When I started emceein', you had 500 maybe 1000 rappers in the whole world. Now there's 1.000.000, nahmean?

I think as time goes on that generation of rappers who's making it now is gonna face the same thing that my generation was facing, which is the decrease of sales. The decrease of hard-copies.

There's strong men of wisdom in many different fields. They say 5% of the people are wise and righteous and 10% are wise but use their wiseness for wickedness or to deceive others. It's like a magician: he knows the answer to the trick, but you don't. He has to keep you blind to the truth in order for the illusion to work. When you've got that kind of wisdom and somebody else doesn't, you can always take advantage of them.

Once you've got an inspired spark, you've got to strive. You've gotta keep putting wood on it, so they say, to keep it burning. But then there's the alchemist side of it, that's the fire that's burning but it don't burn.