"I love the fact that a West Coast pioneer took an East Coast approach to doing an album. Again, it's gangster to have a political opinion. He took that political incorrectness and made poetry out of it - to where again, it wasn’t 'Gangsta', it was 'Gangster'. I could appreciate that; I appreciate the business, not just random gunfire. There was a shock value to it. Gangsta rap now is just little kids talking shit; they’re going to get caught for their crime, they’re not being smart about their criminal activity. I like smart crime; white collar crime, but we’ve gone from the bosses making the music to the hit men."

"I don’t want to say much about La strada other than that it’s the reason why I am here. When you watch this movie, no matter who you are, you get the sense that this is something special that couldn’t have been made for television or heard as a radio play. It’s not Alain Resnais, it’s very accessible, and yet it has cinematic purity. This is a mark of how depressing the movie business has gotten—we don’t make these kinds of movies anymore, movies where there’s just a natural consensus that they’re good. Where you don’t have to wait for critics to say so, because everybody can feel it."