I just love his creativity; that's what I'm talking about as far as being unique and creative and different. Kanye is doing it.

That's probably the key to our success and our longevity, sticking to our formula and what we do best, the hardcore Mobb Deep sound, rather than chasing trains. But we're always experimenting with the art and the creativity of hip-hop.

In the beginning, we might have been focused on totally just music and being famous, just wanting to have fame and make hot music, but as we got older, we had to understand that this is a business and that our moves need to be calculated.

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.

'Dragon's Lair' was real ill.

It took me a while to like Wu-Tang's style.

Music and physical activity goes hand in hand. Music and basketball, man.

I can't front: I like Kanye.

We didn't have any problem with 2Pac. We liked his music.

I always make hardcore songs, hits for the block.

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

When we were making 'Juvenile Hell,' we were listening to the Jungle Brothers, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Biz Markie, A Tribe Called Quest.

I read certain things about history. I don't like fiction. I read about stuff that's real, stuff that's goin' on in the world.

I've learned to respect Rick Ross' music.

I found that preparation is everything when you cook.

At 19, I felt like I was 40.

We started writing songs like 'Shook Ones' and 'Survival of the Fittest' explaining our neighborhood, but more our personal lives.

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

I like any shoot-'em-up game with guns in it.

You got a lot of fradulent rebels and revolutionaries who are really false prophets.

I used to be cold and emotionless. I believe the disease I was born with made me that way.

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

When we signed to G-Unit, 50 made us sign the paper that says, 'You can't talk about nothing about me.' He makes everybody sign that.

I wanna like Obama, but he's all about the world government, world banking, war, and stuff like that. You know what I'm sayin'? He's a phony.

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

There isn't just one black experience out here.

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

Hip-hop music was our life.

I like a lot of the new artists, but there's only one I can name that stands out to me the most: Kendrick Lamar.

I don't like new people coming around me. I'm going to really be leery and watch you and take my time before I embrace you.

I make all types of music. People wanna put me in a little box, and they get mad when I don't stay in there.

The sickle-cell got me where doctors said I couldn't play sports, I couldn't overexert myself.

I been going to the hospital since I was born, about 10 times a year, for about a week or two each time.

When I first went in, I realized there's no green vegetables. They serve, like, spinach once every two weeks. The three meals they serve inmates every day is like slop.

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.

We gotta keep our sound alive, that dark hip-hop.

I love New York. It 'as made me who I am, know what I mean?

As you get older, everybody changes. You don't do the stupid stuff that you used to.

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

Mobb Deep is a street-rap group. We from off the streets.

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

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.

Our style of hip-hop, our style of beats, our style of rhymes - you gonna give us burn. We gonna get our burn that we deserve.

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.

Obama represents one-world government, a.k.a. Neocolonialism. Presidents don't change anything locally - they only deal with foreign policy.

The aggressiveness of it attracted me to hip-hop because I was angry inside. I was an angry kid because of the sickle cell. So I liked the anger in hip-hop. That's what attracted me to it; that's what made me want to do it. It helped me get my aggression out.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

Our first name was the Poetical Prophets before we changed it to Mobb Deep, and when I look back on it now, that was, like, a ill name for us because that is what we really were.

Sickle cell was my life before hip-hop. I ain't really have no life - that was it.

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.