In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.

The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.

Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years.

When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.

Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.

Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time.

Just because the laws were changed doesn't mean that the attitudes have changed.

Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.

We have to get back to "we." It's important to get back to "we" not just "I."

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Life as we know it is merely a dream within dreams.

It takes but one person, one moment, one conviction, to start a ripple of change.

It's easier to change directions while you're still moving.

For The Truman Show, I worked for a few weeks, do my gig, then I was done.

You know as well as I do that counterinsurgency is a very nuanced type of military operation.

I was out there for 12 days. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Kabul.

Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie; for lies breed like Surinam toads; you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones on its back.

Religion is a way of walking, not a way of talking.