I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn't express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

Coming up in the streets, I had to learn how to read people early on. I'm a very analytical person. I observe a lot of the things that people don't notice.

I always knew who I was, and I always ran from my true purpose... I know what my job is. And I always ran from it.

True wealth is not of the pocket, but of the heart and of the mind.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

I was four or five, and my mom got all the Power Rangers to come through. I thought it was really them. I started crying tears of joy. It was so amazing. My favorite Power Ranger was the green one. He wasn't in every episode - he was rare, like Based God. He was like the Based God Power Ranger.

You say that your hope is in God, and he will, I am sure, stand by you. But you must not forget that you have been given worldly means to use and employ against human arrogance and wrong; it is necessary to see such things with a broad mind in order to oppose them.

At Harvard I was taking an African-American studies class, and we were reading about the tragic mulatto. Invariably, the tragic mulatto can't fit in either world and flings herself off a bridge. So I'm reading, and I'm like, 'Oh, my God, I think I'm in literature,' but my life was never like that.