I lived with my grandmother for a year when I was very young, and even to this day, when I tell my mother events that took place, she can't believe that I can recall that far.

My body knows my limits.

I ask for the fights. Sometimes I get them. Sometimes I don't.

I'm a man on a mission.

Yes, I came into this sport as just a grappler, but the more I learn, the more it shines in my fights.

Fans want to see a fight and be entertained.

If fans are willing to pay to see you fight, the promoter is happy.

I believe, if I beat Demian Maia, it's going to be very hard for the other top guys to go around me.

In my village where I'm from, there's still not running water everywhere. People are still struggling to get clean water.

A lot of people are still suffering from water-borne diseases... We want to create something where we can make life better for everyone.

Some guys just like being a fighter, and they live in that world, but I got into this to be champion.

The goal of this, I would like to think, for everybody, is to become champion.

I would say my childhood was amazing.

In other countries, being from somewhere else is celebrated. But not in America.

You don't ever want an African father to come to your school looking for you.

When I first got into the sport, or first got into athletics, I always felt that sense of responsibility that I was destined for something bigger, that I was going to do something major.

As an African, there are certain professions your family want you to do or are willing to sign off. Being in the medical professional, as a doctor, pharmacist, a nurse, or being an engineer - those are the only professions allowed!

When you start out doing something, you never wonder how big is this going to be, or how will I be remembered, or will people even care for me.

We never complained, 'We don't have this or that.' Even though we had to plant certain things and harvest them to be able to eat, we never complained.

I have an excellent team, a great manager, and we're going to put something together: we're going to start a foundation, and we're going to change lives.

When I fought in The Ultimate Fighter Finale, I had microfracture surgery, and that's usually eight month's recovery turnaround. I had to fight three months after that, and I fought three months after that. And I had to train through that with that.

Being a great physical athlete is wonderful, and you need it at this level to be able to train and prepare accordingly. But the closer it comes time to perform, the ratio switches. When you're in camp, it's 90 percent physical and 10 percent mental. But as you get to fight night, it's the opposite.

When you aren't able to do what makes you dominant, what separates you from the pack, it can throw your mind off.

I never in my wildest dreams dreamt of being in a position like this, of having a platform like this, where I can really show the world - not just Africa, but the entire world, people in Asia, India, wherever - that your current situation doesn't have to determine your future.

Once you sign a contract that states that you're going to have to fight this other man for a substantial amount of money, things change psychologically.

You don't have to be outlandish and saying crazy things and get out of yourself to get headlines or attention.

I'm a good, upstanding guy with moral values and core values.

I actually care about things, and I care about people.

Every time you learn a new language, your understanding of language overall grows, so every time I would learn new music, my understanding of music would grow because I was taken to an extreme in a different direction, and that was, in effect, carrying over into what I do.

Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.

There's a whole stereotype of the jazz musician that's into poetry and reading and metaphysics and all that stuff. Really, it's a sign of someone who's searching, whose mind is open, looking for answers. Whatever ideas you may come up with, the beautiful thing is the search.

I used to tell my friends, 'Art Blakey is way more gangster than Eazy-E!' I ended up getting my friends into jazz, and all of a sudden there was this little group of kids in the middle of South Central that were all into hard-bop.

When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the 'Pimp a Butterfly' sessions, Kendrick got it immediately. 'I want it to sound like it's on fire,' he'd say. That's the kind of common ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.

Becoming a musician is a strange thing. It's not all cupcakes and ice cream. You're trying to master an instrument, and you sometimes can't tell if you're getting better. You love it, but you also hate it.

Gerald Wilson was one of my mentors: he was in his nineties before he passed and, literally, every time I saw him, he'd be like, 'Man, Kamasi, I've got this new thing! Nobody ever heard anything like this before!' It's amazing hanging out with somebody that was born in 1918.

My hope is that witnessing the beautiful harmony created by merging different musical melodies will help people realize the beauty in our own differences.

My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

The fact of the matter is that nobody understands what John Coltrane is doing except John Coltrane. And maybe not even him. So we're all experiencing it on this subconscious level.

I have to always check back in with my imagination just to remember that I have this infinite potential, and I can do anything, and anything is possible.

Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just taking the music that comes to me and trying to make it as beautiful as I can. You can't really predict or control how people will receive that music.

I've known that about myself, that I've had two sides: one that's pretty tactical, down to earth, aware. There's also a really spacey side. But I realized they're kinda the same thing.

A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people's legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I've never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don't think that I can.

I think the open mind is the one that's reachable.

Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to 'The Chronic,' there's flute solos and everything. It's always been there.

There's a deeper level of healing that needs to happen for the world in general. There's a mass of people who are broken.

You have to dig deep to make great music, and it gets harder and harder. It's a difficult, painful process to reach deep in there and pull out the real gems. And you have to have that little bit of anxiety of, 'Can I really do this? Am I good enough?' You need that in the recipe to really get down in there.

All forms are complex once you get to a really high level, and jazz and hip-hop are so connected. In hip-hop, you sample, while in jazz, you take Broadway tunes and turn them into something different. They're both forms that repurpose other forms of music.

I can't really worry about nuclear war any more than I can worry about the aliens coming.

West Coast hip hop was the sound of my neighbourhood. It was something I could relate to because it had a sound that felt like my surroundings - almost more so than what they were saying. That music was made to be bumped in a Cadillac!