“My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I'm so far away from that life - now that I've got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers - that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.”

“Dear Diary,My pen is finally touching your pages. It is time to tell our story. Our story began in China and now it continues in America. I want to write about our old life and I want to write about our life now. I will write it all down with hopes that somehow I can connect the two worlds I have lived in. Right now those worlds seem so far apart.”

“Now that I've let go of my story, I can let go of my life.”

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

“I never think of the life I'll miss after I'm dead, or all that I missed before I was born. It's the time I'm as good as dead during this, my one and only life, that makes me tear at my hair. It seems to me that if I carefully gathered all of the time I was entirely alive I would have amassed perhaps two years of life so far...”