Sometimes, when you're doing too much, things get overwhelming. So I just have to calm myself down and think, 'What would my mama want me to do?'

I'm not a fake person.

I'm not a character, so how I rap is just an everyday thing.

I want to show other girls how happy I am and how confident I am, how I still want to go to school and I still want to rap.

My mom was a rapper and she really shaped me as a woman, and the music that she was letting me listen to as a child really pushed me in the direction that I'm going in right now.

When I was first coming out, I was definitely getting a lot of comparisons to Trina.

I do not like disappointing people.

When I drop a freestyle, I'm like, 'This freestyle gotta go hard' or when I do something it's, 'How can we top this?'

My favorite song used to be 'The Nasty Song' by this dude named Lil Ru. That was my jam!

I wanna work with my girl Maliibu Miitch. I love Maliibu. I definitely wanna work with Beyonce, Rihanna. I'm a huge fan of Rihanna and Beyonce, so that's like my dream collab.

I listen to a lot of Biggie, he's so lyrical.

Being an XXL Freshman means that I actually grinded a lot to get here.

Everything that's happened to me is happening very organically. It's nothing that we paying for, nothing that we asking for.

I've been like this forever. I'm sweeter, probably, but me and my homegirls were a little buckwild, ya know? And it only got worse.

I'ma just rap and do me.

You find out about me because of my music, and that's how I want to keep it.

One of my eco-friendly hotties asked how I felt about climate change telling me that no one was listening to her, so I asked her, 'What can we do to help?!'

I knew I wanted to be a rapper when I was, like, 5.

My mom was a rapper. I would go to the studio with her, and that definitely showed me I can do this, I wanna do this.

You don't have a lot of women doing things for women, so when I'm rapping I gotta talk all this mess so the women can feel as confident and empowered as the men.

Being a rapper and still trying to pursue an education is really overwhelming sometimes.

Since I was younger, I've always had the same body. Older guys would always be like, 'Oh you a stallion.' I finally had to ask, like, is that a good thing? Everybody pretty much took it and ran with it, and then I put it as my main name on Twitter. Ever since then everybody's just been calling me Stallion.

I've been writing since I was maybe seven.

I was kind of shy about telling people that I could rap for the longest.

Just to know that the people in my city are really rocking with me, I just love it.

My mom is a very strong woman, very tough lady.

I feel like boys listen to my music. They just don't like to admit it, but I go hard. But yeah, I feel like I go really hard, so why not listen to me? Anybody could relate to my music, honestly.

A man could come in the room with his hair not cut, not done, pants around his ankles and people still gon' be like, 'Oh, that's his style. It's cool.' Being a woman, you have to be on your P's and Q's at all times, because not only do you have to keep up your appearance for men, but other women judge you so hard.

My mom was a big UGK fan.

I felt like my mixtapes were me flirting with my fans.

A lot of people's favorite rappers will literally get in the booth and just make sounds.

Inuyasha' is one of my favorite animes.

Honestly, I'm not going to lie. I was a good kid.

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.

Let's face it: every campus has its share of students who can't quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry.

Posting a brag, humble or otherwise, and then waiting for people to respond is the equivalent of having a conversation in which all you do is wait for your turn to speak.

Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot.

In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.

It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.

I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.

I was enamored of New York City intellectual life and was really into Philip Roth because I was raised by self-loathing Midwesterners who were from southern Illinois, who felt like fish out of water when they came to the East Coast when I was a kid.

People have always taken photos of themselves, either with camera timers or by handing their Nikons over to strangers in foreign countries and then paying large sums to get them back.

We use our gadgets for distraction and entertainment. We use them to avoid work while giving the impression that we're actually working hard.

Each year, in my quaint efforts to send out paper holiday cards with personal messages, I probably discard one for every three I actually manage to put in the mail. The reason is that my handwriting is now less legible than it was when I was in the second grade.

I loved 'About Schmidt'. I like Alexander Payne's work a lot.

Not everyone in Santa Monica is a well-heeled, juice-cleansing, Prius-driving yogini, but for better or worse, that is the city's dominant chord.

I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.'

People who choose not to have kids do so because they respect the job of parenting so much that they know not to take it on if they know it's not something that they're up for, and I don't know what to be a bigger tribute to parenting than that.