I think everybody focuses on race, but it's about a ton of things, and I just see these things as all interrelated and all interwoven in a weird way.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

Your smile breaks my heart, And your laughter burns my skin, And if I had to tell you how I feel, That's where I'd begin.

Complaining is a complete waste of one's energy. Those who complain the most accomplish the least.

When a parent shows up with an attitude of entitlement, understand that under it is a boatload of anxiety.

I always remember having a healthy respect for my grandmother.

Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

I used to get drunk in venues after my shows and sign the walls "Ed was here." So if you see that, it was me.

People who say that music is dead or hip-hop is dead are refusing to evolve.

I knew one hundred little things about Noah Shaw but when he kissed me I couldn't remember my own name.

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?

Religion, Society, and Nature--these are the three struggles of man.