If you look at my career, doing albums with Norah Jones, Justin Timberlake, Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne or KRS-One and Jean Grae, I can't be pigeonholed.

A flower that grow in the ghetto know more about survival than the one from fresh meadows.

Skip the religion and politics, head straight to the compassion. Everything else is a distraction.

I ignored your aura but it grabbed me by the hand, like the moon pulled the tide, and the tide pulled the sand.

Do the math: You never settle for less than the whole if you knew the half.

You gotta get back to your essence, Use your gifts and share your presence, Don't count your dollars 'til you count your blessings.

Life without knowledge is death in disguise.

The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.

If lyrics sold then truth be told/I'd probably be just as rich and famous as Jay-Z.

I'm at a loss for words. But even my loss is amplified.

You know, there's a lot of activism that doesn't deal with empowerment, and you have to empower yourself in order to be relevant to any type of struggle.

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

If you have to support yourself you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.

I've never had a message for anyone in my entire life. Except maybe to give out my room number.

The West is boring itself to death! And talking itself to death!

While earning your daily bread, be sure you share a slice with those less fortunate.

We must eat to live, and not live to eat.

[Writing a joke] there is no team of writers. It's just you in an office, staring at yourself in the mirror.

The rules are what make us better.

It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.