“A good emcee will rhyme a lot of different ways. Don't limit yourself.”

“A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes.”

“AIDS is such a scary thing and it's also the kind of thing that you think won't happen to you. It can happen to you and it's deadly serious.”

“An MC is somebody who can control the crowd. An MC is a master of ceremonies so not only can you say your rap, you can rock the party.”

“As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.”

“As long as I'm around the cats in the hip hop scene, they'll throw me a track and I'll write a rap over it.”

“Being cool is when you win, you don't get too happy; and when you lose, you don't get too mad.”

“Every once in a while, I hear somebody call me Tracy to try to let me know that they know me, you know, personally. But most of my real friends will call me Trey, or 'Ice' was basically short for Iceberg. So they would call me - some of my boys call me Berg.”

“Everything we do helps the new artists in the long run.”

“Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.”

“I ain't got no beef with east coast, I think it's just being hyped up.”

“I don't feel that rap has been respected as an art form. Because people have seen rappers rap off the top of their heads, they don't think it is difficult.”

“I don't have to put out another rap record. I can do it at my casual pace.”

“I have no hatred for cops. I have hatred for racists and brutal people, but not necessarily the cops. The cops are just doing what they're told to do.”

“I make an effort to keep it as real as I possibly can.”

“I started rapping before anybody had ever bought a car from it. It was truly about the art form and the culture, more so than now, where it's a successful way to make money. Back then you had to be doing it because you liked it.”

“I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.”

“I think everybody wants to redeem themselves after they've done something that might be considered negative. I don't think anyone wants to go to the grave negative.”

“I think L.A. radio is learning from the Bay. The Bay is a very classic place. Mac Mall, C-Bo, all that stuff, they love their artists, they're old school up there. My first big concert was playing in the Bay; I played the Fillmore.”

“I think men, growing up, you have to go through some form of hardship. You've got to harden the metal.”

“I think, people look at me, and they say, 'You were very aggressive,' I say, 'Yeah,' you know, and I've made a better life for myself, for my son, so I should reflect that with my music now. I shouldn't still be rhyming like that; that would be me lying.”

“I think singing and acting go hand in hand. Take an R&B singer: one song says, 'I love you,' the next is, 'Baby, don't leave me', the next is, 'If you leave me I don't care.' You have to drop in and out of different perspectives.”

“I think the most successful are the most paranoid. The first thing people do when they buy a mansion is they build the biggest wall you could possibly build around it. What happens is, now you become a target. If I go into the hood, I'm at a disadvantage. They could carry guns. I can't. They can hit me in the face. I can't.”

“I think when people say 'real hip-hop,' they want it more buried in the streets. They want it more connected to the streets and the grime and the roughness of the streets. They don't want the fluff.”

“I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street.”

“If I do a song where I'm angry, when it's time to perform it live I'm not mad, I'm happy. I'm at a concert. But I have to somehow drum up that rage. That's acting.”

“If somebody wants to kill people, they don't need a gun to do it.”

“If you're really a rapper, you can't stop rapping.”

“I'm a big fan of all styles, even Biggie and Wu-Tang, but I gotta do my thing.”

“I'm just disillusioned with the hip-hop sound right now. It's too materialistic. You know, I'm the kind of guy ... I can't do that. If you track my movement, you'll never see a picture of me with any girl that wasn't mine, or my own car. My jewelry, my clothes. What kind of gangsta rapper has a stylist? A stylist?!”

“I'm normal. I just had a different occupation for a while, and when you're in a different occupation, you have to carry yourself a different way. Most of my art is me bringing you stories from that era of my life. My life now is kind of boring.”

“I'm on the front line and I am a rapper.”

“I've evolved, but I'm the same dude, I'm just in a different place. We all change, we all grow. I shouldn't be in the same place that I was 30 years ago; I should be more intelligent, you know.”

“I've never been competitive with anybody but myself.”

“Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn't have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn't write it down on paper. He doesn't freestyle onto the track, it's all thought out.”

“Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.”

“Military is a great place for a jock. That's the first thing they test you, they test you physically. If you can run, if you can do the pushups, it's not as hard a transition. If you can't do that, you're going to have a problem because they're going to really work it out of you or work it into you.”

“My father was a dark-skinned brother, but my mother was a very fair-skinned lady. From what I understand, she was Creole; we think her people originally came from New Orleans. She looked almost like a white woman, which meant she could pass - as folks used to say back then. Her hair was jet-black. She was slim and very attractive.”

“My father's family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn't a brother who talked a lot. He was a workingman, a quiet, blue-collar dude.”

“My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that's when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt.”

“My name, my real name, is Tracy. I always thought I was like a boy named Sue. So I made my friends call me 'Tray.'”

“Redemption just means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong.”

“So from an actor's perspective, you really have no idea how you're acting.”

“Some music comes from a real place; some music comes from your imagination. It's difficult to find out what's real and what's not, especially with the gangster stuff.”

“The right to bear arms is because it's the last form of defense against tyranny.”

“Ultimately I am happy that everybody is embracing hip hop and the sounds from the streets.”

“Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the sounds I was creating.”

“When I first got into the rap game, I had an early dream of unifying rappers.”

“When you start a business, go for the lowest hanging fruit.”

“You can't come out on a record dissing the system and be on a label that's connected to the system.”

“You have the core hip-hop, which would just be beats and breaks, more something like what you hear with DJ Premier. Then you get into the more highly produced hip-hop, which is something like what DJ Khaled does. But at some point, it starts to get kind of pop.”

“You have to come in on a professional level to make it, otherwise you just can't get into rap.”