All the rappers my age are getting Audemars and Rolexes. I want to find my own thing. That's why I travel the world - for me, that's my B-side, why we go places. I have a Hublot on from time to time but I want a home base watch - something that's elegant but has got a little pizzazz to it.

Sometimes I'm happy - you can tell via Twitter. Sometimes I'm pissed off - you can tell via Twitter. I just think, at the end of the day, I don't want them to see me as a celebrity; I just want them to see me and say, 'He's like a regular person at his job right now who's mad.'

Basically, the Internet is just the way now. It's the end-all, be-all of self-promotion. It's not like you got to burn CDs and pass them out or sell them. The Internet is a tool that reaches billions and billions of people. It's like a no-brainer to tie it in with self-promotion, or even label promotion.

However, people need to understand that it ain't that deep to try and convince people of what your persona is. You are who you are, and what you are will show in time. What you aren't can be hidden, but eventually it will come to light. Long story short: rappers should never take themselves too seriously.

Hip-hop is all about impact, baby. You can sell records, you can be two-times platinum, you can be gold... but if you lame, you lame, man. We try to provide the exact opposite of that. It's style, individuality, confidence. We exude that.

I worked at a hot dog place, a bagel place, the Jersey Store and the hottest fashion joint around. I was getting too famous to work there anymore. I was almost showing up as a joke. I made $2,000 on my show the previous night and I'm going to go shopping during my five-hour shift.

I'm very proud of my Nigerian heritage. I wasn't fortunate enough to be raised in a heavy Nigerian environment, because my parents were always working. My father was with D.C. Cabs and my mother worked in fast food and was a nurse.

You can be a rapper born and raised in go-go music, violence, drugs, crack, Reagonomics, and still, if you hear 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,' you're going to find a way to hum along. Guilty pleasures? It don't matter. Sue me - I like the song. To dance to it is another matter.

I've seen all types of women. Celebrity girls I've dated and regular 9 to 5 girls. I've had shows where married women have tried to follow me to my hotel. My perception of women isn't very ignorant because I've seen a lot.

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.