When you do mixtapes, a lot of times your fanbase can say, 'We've been getting this for free for so many years, his new album is about to drop, we've listened to it, and we're not going to buy it. We'll download it for free.'

For the first six years of my career I was independent. I got on to a major and did my thing there. I had platinum and gold records and all that.

Sometimes all your fanbase wants you to do is stay within your envelope and do you because that's what they love you for.

When I do listen to music a lot of times I listen to old school music, I'm talking about Earth, Wind & Fire, I'm talking about the Isley Brothers, the O'Jays. It just eases my mind.

I don't listen to rap all the time. Even though I rap, rap can be nerve-wracking.

I'm just a storyteller.

I paint pictures with my raps.

I was a little bit ahead of my time.

Long as the Earth is here, hip-hop'll be here.

You know, I don't turn down autographs. I try to sign as many autographs as I can.

Communication, that keeps everything cool. Not holding anything back, you got to tell each other what's on your mind, that's really it. Otherwise when one gets mad at one, it can burst and you just let it out and it can just come out wrong.

The rap game without me would be like woofers without bass.

I had T-Pain on one of my singles before anyone really knew of him. I was the first one to put that to life of having T-Pain on the hook.

I will rap circles around anybody.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

History develops, art stands still.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.