Prodigy

“I'm a creative person, and I'm gonna be creative, so whoever's upset because of that, that's too bad.”

“It was the camaraderie and the friendships, too, that really drew me to Queensbridge.”

“At 19, I felt like I was 40.”

“The NYPD is just a branch of corruption connected to a giant, corrupt tree called the United States government.”

“All the 'Scarface' beats that you hear Mobb Deep sample, that was my idea.”

“Intellectuals that read a lot of books might not have been interested in Mobb Deep before 'My Infamous Life,' but now they might go, 'Who are these guys?' and check us out.”

“When I said, 'I'm only 19, but my mind is old' - at that time, when I said that line, I was 18.”

“That's what 'Hell On Earth' was about: we felt that we were living in hell.”

“Basically, I've always raised my kids that people learn from their mistakes, and every father wants their kids to be better than them.”

“I'm not scared to speak my mind and tell you what it is.”

“I don't want fans anymore, because the definition of a fan is a fanatic. The people who buy my product and ride with me are my supporters, not fanatics.”

“You gotta be careful and just learn from your mistakes.”

“From the neighborhoods that we grew up in, we had to learn how to deal with people. How to keep certain people at a distance, how to cut people off completely.”

“I was a very serious child who never got to enjoy life to the fullest like a normal, healthy kid.”

“When you are young and rebellious, you don't want to be in the house. You want to be on the block.”

“Hip-hop basically controls the world through fashion, through music, through language, through culture. It's basically running the world, no matter what anyone wants to think, and that's just the way it is.”

“I have a deadly disease called Sickle Cell Anemia that I was born with that affects millions of others - primarily in the Black and Latino cultures. I feel I can inspire others with this Sickle Cell disease to be strong and believe in themselves.”

“Jive is a good label, but they're R&B'ed out.”

“Beauty ain't always a little, cute colored flower. Beauty is anything where people be like, 'Damn.'”

“When my family first moved to Hempstead in the 1960s, they were one of the first black families. It used to be an all-white neighborhood, but there was white flight when the black people with money started moving in. When I was, like, 13 or 14, Hempstead had just become all black, and the poverty became worse and worse.”