There are staples to my show. I have to be conscious about switching things up because I know people who saw me last year will say, 'He did that last time.' But if certain things work, they work.

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.

Big changes could come quickly, and he wondered what else might happen to his heart while he wasn't paying attention.

Home.” This was my mantra, my four-letter savior.

Failure is not about insecurity. It's about lack of execution.

Jurors want courtroom lawyers to have some compassion and be nice.

The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.

All I ever wanted to do was be on stage, if possible acting in Shakespeare. And to be as good as I could be.

And sometimes I think there isn’t anything to us but our mistakes.

It is better, I think, to grab at the stars than to sit flustered because you know you cannot reach them.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.