You have to find a sound that reflects what our souls feel like inside, how our bodies actually feel. That's why we made our own beats. We couldn't find a producer who could give us the feeling to match our lyrics.

My kids know they can't make the same mistakes I've made. They've been through a lot with me always being on the road.

My favorite Eminem song is probably 'Lose Yourself' because I can relate to it a lot. That's how I feel every time I write a rhyme.

I'm a big fan of Kurt Cobain. I put a picture of him holding a gun on my Instagram for his birthday. He's definitely one of my favorite rock artists.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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