"I mean, Scorsese has to be in there. I always feel bad for these, because there’s always about 50 films I wish I could have put in there. Scorsese for sure, and I always get torn between Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. That’s my top three Scorsese films. I have a amazing soft spot for Mean Streets — I just think there’s something incredibly raw and energetic about that movie. But I think Raging Bull just shocked me to my core. I couldn’t believe that he could make me care about someone who was so animalistic, who was so brutal, who was so violent. And then I still felt sympathy for him. I still felt like I got to know a well-rounded human being, I got to know this character in that performance. De Niro is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in my life. And those boxing sequences, they’ve never been matched, they’ve never been bettered for me. So, I think Raging Bull is definitely up there."

"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."