"Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful."

"Truth is the ultimate power. When the truth comes around, all the lies have to run and hide."

"I love music. It's freedom, a way to deal with pent-up frustration."

"Don't worry about being a star, worry about doing good work, and all that will come to you."

"If it was all about me, I'd do a whole lot of pop records, make a whole lot of money, just rake in the dough. But it's never been all about me. It's all about being a voice for the voiceless. People who can't speak for themselves, who don't have a mic, don't have a say."

"I was a very interested arts student, I was always into that part of school and when I got into high school I went into architectural drafting. It gave me an understanding of how to build things and it's really helped me put things in perspective. With my music and my movies, to me it's all art."

"I think, to me, reality is better than being fake."

"I believe how you measure a good movie is how many times you can see it. With comedies, I like to be a producer, because comedies can get corny and go off track real fast. I'm always the 'less is more' guy when it comes to a scene. So I'ma be the one who will keep it grounded."

"'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them."

"I used to game a lot, you know, back in the day. My gaming time done got so short that my skills ain't where they need to be to be online, you know what I'm saying? I just got that Xbox One. I gotta get my skills back, up the par to call myself a gamer."

"I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'"

"But with rap music - not just N.W.A. - but rap music in general, seeing these artists wearing these team logos all the time started bringing a synergy and energy about having to rep your city, your team, everywhere and all the time."

"What I learned from architectural drafting is that everything has to have a plan to work. You just can't wing it. I can't get all the materials I need for a house and just start building. Whether it's a career, family, life - you have to plan it out."

"I have great people, smart people that are around me and we love the challenge. I guess it's like climbing a mountain or building a building. It's a challenge but you love every challenge that it brings or presents itself."

"I'm trying to cut down a little on eating, on sodium, keep my blood pressure down, which is tough. Because I love food! I do, but it's unfair how everything that's bad for you tastes so good, and all the good stuff, veggies and green things, doesn't match up."

"I've been caught in parachute pants. And on my high school yearbook, they used the wrong picture. They were supposed to use the picture of me with a nice suit on. They used me with my collar flipped up, in a fuchsia and white striped shirt. I blame Prince and Michael Jackson in the Eighties for that."

"It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'"

"I used to love to draw. I didn't want to go to art class because I felt that would be too corny when I was young, but architectural drafting was the cool thing to do because there was more precision. It taught me a lot about building and structures and doorways and frames and windowsills."

"It's not like I'm the first man ever to do this, y'know? You gotta go back to Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr. Those are people who've done music well and movies well, and y'know, Frank Sinatra and Elvis and all these dudes have made the transition. I don't know about Elvis, 'bout doin' 'em good, y'know? It's nothin' new."

"Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my heart is and that's what I think about all the time."

"Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing."

"With film, I have to be a team player; it's a whole different thing. I can't just be a one-man show. I have to learn how to use people to the best of their ability and motivate them to be as passionate about the project as I am."

"Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles."

"My grandmother worked at one of those Bel-Air mansions, and we would go - not too often, but every now and then - to pick her up. Hollywood was probably 12 miles from my house, but it might as well have been a million miles away. The only time I saw that world was on TV. Until I started making records."

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

"The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early."

"It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"Jazz is the music of the body"

"He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie."

"What I cannot love, I overlook"

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection"

"Woman does not forget she needs the fecundator, she does not forget that everything that is born of her is planted in her."

"Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning."

"Good things happen to those who hustle."

"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it."

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"What I cannot love, I overlook. Is that real friendship?"

"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."

"My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living."

"There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person."

"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."

"If all of us acted in unison as I act individually there would be no wars and no poverty. I have made myself personally responsible for the fate of every human being who has come my way."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all."

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."