I'm a thug. And my thug comes from... my definition of thug comes from half of the street element. Straight street hustling.
Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.
With rap music, because it's all so on the street, you get treated like a street cat: "All right, you've been eatin' enough, you're fat, get out of the way now and let somebody else come by."
I've got big homies that done been through the same thing I've been through and they made it out, changed their life and they come back and snatch young cats up and lecture them and let them know right way to do it.
I can't give up. It's a rap thang. And I ain't goin back to the crack game.
I'm the greatest game-spitter of all time. I talk about the swell, the block, the 'hood. I'm a street commentator. I narrate how people live. That's E-40.
I'll just walk around New York and watch people on the streets.
I befriended a homeless man five years ago, bought him a new set of teeth, helped him get his life on track. A writer for 'Elle' spent two hours talking to this guy and discarded almost everything he said. When the story came out, we both were weeping while reading it on the street!
We were always just a hardcore band that came out and said what we believed in, but we also talked about the streets and the stuff that we were into and the struggles and everything we were going through. Once people found out we were Christian, it was always, 'Is that Christian music?'
In L.A., you have to drive; in New York, you can do it on foot. The variety, the potential, of people is in your face. Like any good creator, you want to steal everything.
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.
You grow up as an artist in a big city. As James Dean said, you're going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don't accept people's sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless; I didn't have any money, and I was living in my car. I was 18.
I think in Vice and American Me I played very silent, rigid characters and people remember them.
Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.
Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.
I grew up in Compton: 116th and Wilmington.
If I have open time, and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.
I'd been going though his trash. He knocked me down. I was glad to see him, even though he was banging my head against the sidewalk. Afterwards these bums come over and say, 'Did he get much money?' I say, 'Money'? That was Bob Dylan.
When Big Meech and everybody got indicted, hustling died. Keep it trill.
I don't think there's much a person could say about me. My gangster's never been on trial.
I want people to feel the heat while they walk down the street and they're just kickin' it.
I come from where Mike Tyson came from. I come from right across the street from Jay-Z. I didn't have a pond in my backyard. I saw violence.
I've been through all the bad parts of the streets.
When I go back to New York all these years later, I'll walk down Seventh Avenue, and I'll hear, 'Yo, Oz!' In New York, I get recognized for that all the time.
