My music will mean something. I'll have my own production company. I'm doing my own movies. I have my own restaurant. I just wanna expand.

If you walked by a street and you was walking a concrete and you saw a rose growing from concrete, even if it had messed up petals and it was a little to the side you would marvel at just seeing a rose grow through concrete. So way is it that when you see some ghetto kid grow out of the dirtiest circumstance and he can talk and he can sit across the room and make you cry, make you laugh, all you can talk about is my dirty rose, my dirty stems and how am leaning crooked to the side, u can't even see that I've come up from out of that.

Even thugs cry, but do the Lord care?

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

It was tough sitting in jail listening to Jay Leno and Rush Limbaugh and everybody making jokes about me getting shot. And watching the media report all kinds of lies about me, like that I got raped in jail. That never happened. But at least while I was locked down, all the inmates gave me props encouragement, and so did lots of mothers and kids, who wrote me letters of support.

If you can make it through the night, there's a brighter day.

I can't give up. It's a rap thang. And I ain't goin back to the crack game.