A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

You could name practically any problem in the hood and there'd be a rap song for you.

Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.

I wanted to kill Auto-Tune like Kurt Cobain killed the hair bands.

Only God can judge me so I'm gone, either love me or leave me alone.

Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.

Crackheads were different. They’d smoke in hallways, on playgrounds, on subway station suitcases. They got no respect. They were former neighbors, ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’, but once they started smoking, they were simply crackheads, the lowest on the food chain in the jungle, worse than prostitutes and almost as bad as snitches.

Difficult takes a day Impossible takes a week I do this in my sleep

They say a midget standing on a giant's shoulders can see much further than the giant. So I got the whole rap world on my shoulders, they trying to see further than I am.