My first gig was at Radio City Music Hall when I was 13.

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."

If my strength is technology, financial structuring is my son's skill.

Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings, and a system of measures, correspondingly erroneous.

The nationalist has a broad hatred and a narrow love.

You can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.

I feel the flame of eternity in my soul.

I can fill a church speaking on Revelation and empty it speaking on Romans.

I never believe anything in the world of entertainment until it actually happens and the check clears the bank.

Three-quarters of the flags, borders and anthems sitting at the U.N. today were not there 60 some-odd years ago.

Escapism has value, even if I don't know what its value is, exactly. Maybe it's just part of some healthy way that we deal with the world.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.