If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

Character is destiny.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

I’m not very ambitious at all.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

Originality is really important.

My whole thing now is I know how to think properly to be successful in all aspects of my life. It’s not about ultra running or being a SEAL or pull-up records: it’s about if you want to be better you, have to change your perceived limitations and take the barriers down.

No one can give you better advice than yourself.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

When you can whip any man in the world, you never know peace.

Some men can live up to their loftiest ideals without ever going higher than a basement.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

I wish everyone well, but you need to focus on yourself. You need to stop putting your hand out. Everyone wants hand outs. Everyone wants things for free. You’ve got to put in the work. You’ve got to grind. You’ve got go through the struggle, and you’ve got to get it.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.

A collection is not just one basic idea. It comes from something that is in the air, something you suddenly like and put down on paper and then work out.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I’m not really book-smart.

In the future, you won’t buy artists‘ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of ‚their‘ works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.

I just kind of wake up with a new idea and new dreams every day, and I follow that dream, as they say.

I just genuinely feel that that’s what you do when you’re an artist: You stick up for the people around you.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Self-worth comes from one thing – thinking that you are worthy.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one’s children will become than for the children one’s ‚mature‘ critics often are.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

I like the app where you can make your own memes. I make memes all the time and send them to my friends.

Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.

I like to do things quickly because I’m easily bored.

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.

If I was to go to sleep before midnight, I would feel weird about myself, like I wasted a day. My most productive hours are between midnight and five.

You may delay, but time will not.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

You do things when the opportunities come along. I’ve had periods in my life when I’ve had a bundle of ideas come along, and I’ve had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I’ll do something. If not, I won’t do a damn thing.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

I already am a product.

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

I don’t even know how to speak up for myself, because I don’t really have a father who would give me the confidence or advice. And if you’re always the new kid, you never get a chance to adapt, so your confidence is just zilch.

It’s like a muscle – if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don’t keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

I’m not a sheep.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.

When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I think hygiene is so important.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

The idea that you encourage companies to take their innovative thinkers and think about the most needy – even beyond the market opportunities – that’s something that appropriately ought to be done.

You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.

You can’t hire someone to practice for you.