"I got into that around 2008. That again was all about hopelessness, there was some positivity in there, but I think he had a lot to say on this album. He never bettered it. That second track, the line, ""Cuz you never know when you're going to go!"" Chilling, really. I haven't listened to it for a long time, but you have the sense of a cold afternoon in the projects, an afternoon spent doing nothing, walking up the stairs to your apartment, the hopelessness of being a young black kid. He wasn't really a funny guy, Nas. But brutal. He must have been educating himself. Books are a great source, aren't they. Some literature was held in some circles, myths about certain books, what I tend to find with a lot of rappers is this religious connection, even though some won't admit it, black culture is very connected to religion, more so than white people. It's kind of that as well, the fear of the wrath of god."

"Before I read Achebe as a child in Nigeria, I read only foreign children’s books, and so I wrote about the same things I was reading – all my characters were White and the stories were set in England or a generic Westernised country. I had not read books that featured people like me, so I thought that books couldn’t include people like me. Until I discovered Achebe. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course – I was too young to be consciously aware of that sort of thing – but later I would realise that reading Achebe was a turning point. It made me see that it was, in fact, possible for people of colour to exist within literature. Arrow of God has remained one of my favourite novels. Set in 1920s Igboland, it tells the story of a remarkable priest, Ezeulu, and a British administrator, and the ways in which colonialism brought not only political but cultural changes. It is funny and absorbing, moving and beautiful. I love this book."