I can take an opinion, but I don't like when you try and spew hate and contaminate the way other people think. I feel like I'm one of the people that's always made music for the common man. That's why I don't really live my life the way I could. I don't stunt as much as I could stunt, 'cause that's not who my music is for.

I never understood the idea that I was a 'backpack rapper.' I think that's a lazy way that people started thinking. They like saying that because I got dreads. I look like I belong a certain place, so it's easy to put everything in a box.

I've become a workaholic. When the shows slow down and there's no press and I can get my time to myself in the studio with my music, I get into this zone, man. I enter this incredible space where I'm just making music. And I feel like I can work with anybody - with Elton John, with Hanson - and I can make something incredible.

As much as I don't want to admit it, my fans are the only ones that can hurt my feelings when they're not pleased with what I'm presenting. I want it to be perfect for them. I want them to have a different sense of pride in my music.

Not to sound corny, but intelligence is big. Everything fades, and everything can be modified. But intelligence is something you can't fake. I'm not even talking about whether you can read a thesaurus backwards. But there is a beauty in common sense.

Not to sound bad, but some girls are dumb. It's because they spend so much of their life trying to have the right look. On the other hand, some girls are just really smart. There are girls you can have conversations with that are healthy conversations. You can argue real life issues and solve problems together. That is what makes a woman sexy.

I dated all these girls and ended up not liking them and thought to myself, 'What was it that all of them had in common?' They had too much time on their hands. Even though they were pretty, they lacked something. A woman could be less attractive but with ambition and drive, that's the most beautiful thing.

I'm at like 325 pairs right now, give or take. But I've given away about 200 pairs of sneakers. I'm not as big of a collector as I used to be, because I think the game just got weird. Everybody likes to collect now, so it's kind of corny. But I got the essentials.

You can get all A's and still flunk life.

Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives...

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.

Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.

People usually told him the same joke two or three times.

At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

During my last year in college I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harr harr.

I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.

...this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.

Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries.

A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.

But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness--if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person--places a heavy burden on travel.

...the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.

Soap shining beauty.