Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

I just want to be myself.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. I don’t know how to do anything else.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

You know, I just do whatever feels right to me! And so that’s what you’re gonna get!

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

I’m here to spread a message of hope. Follow your heart. Don’t follow what you’ve been told you’re supposed to do.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.

I don’t mind telling a dark side.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Fashion is that thing that saved me from being sad.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.

I don’t believe in doing things to manufacture my body to appeal to what I think people might like.

If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

As social animals, we are extremely susceptible to the moods of other people. This gives us the power to subtly infuse into people the appropriate mood for influencing them.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really?

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That’s not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that’s what life needs to be – and that if it’s not that, it’s all screwed up. It’s not.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Art is the proper task of life.

I think there is a little magic in the fact that I’m so totally real but look so artificial at the same time.

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.

If you’re performing music that is not who you are or where you’re at, it is painful. It’s painful for the performer and for the audience.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

The worst crime is faking it.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner – I don’t choose to insulate myself in engaging in real life. Hence, the public kind of almost knows me as much through my real life that they see through the rag mags.

I wish they would only take me as I am.

I never want to change so much that people can’t recognize me.

Like Frank Sinatra, I’m doing it my way.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

My apartment is my stage, and my bedroom is my stage – they’re just not stages you’re allowed to see.