Allow yourself to be out of your depth at all times.
Some things, it's very useful to begin without knowing fully where you're going.
If you ever feel comfortable in what you're producing, you've lost. You're not alive, that's it, it's stagnant water.
Never expect what you write to be any good, 'cause it's the fear of writing badly that stops you from finding the right words.
My point is is that if you are ever comfortable you're not growing and if, unless you are completely out of your depth, your creativity of whatever you are producing, you will never know how strong your stroke it.
When your tongue can taste shadows and your friends are shedding tears, That's when you know that hell is empty 'cos all the devils are here.
The minute you finish a piece of writing it doesn't belong to you, you don't write it any more, it belongs to you, the reader, the listener, the audience. So the less you know about whether or not this is me talking about my life or this is me talking about your life, I think the better. Then it can belong to you and it can live outside of the moment in which it was conceived.
Actually in the moment in which the idea has life, when it's listened to read, engaged with, acted on stage, it gains another dimension, it becomes three dimensional.
You don't know how to get yourself out of that deep water until you're in the deep water.
Your job is to facilitate and improve your capacity so that when an idea comes you can facilitate it. That's your job as a human being, in my opinion anyway.
There's enough brackets put on us already, we don't need to bracket our creativity anymore than we do.
It's actually a very liberating thing to have a creative community, which is something that we all kind of desperately search for and find in the ways that we can.
When I began rapping, I only had one form at my disposal. All I had, all I needed was a rhyme verse; sixteen bar, thirty-two bar, whatever it was. If I had an idea it came out as a rhyme. When I challenged myself to think beyond that, my first thing other than a rhyme that I wrote was a play.
When you know a place, your feet have walked it so many times there's a comfort to it.
The more you close the doors, the less free your ideas can come, and they come from up here and come through you.
When you're a story teller, you work out everything. You work out who these people are, what's going to be happening. The environment in which they live.
In London, the most, the biggest thing we have is culture, you know what I mean? That's what we've done for the past 50, 60 100 years, this is what we've done. My worry is that that will change but actually, that will never change because musicians will just go somewhere else.
A story comes into your head fully formed, you know exactly the place, the setting, the people. All you've got to do is get it our and written as soon as you possibly can.
I live or die for hip-hop and it's a beautiful form but you're a writer first and foremost.
