Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the...

Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.

I’m competitive in that I would like to outsell my last record.

An MC is somebody who can control the crowd. An MC is a master of ceremonies so not only can you say your rap, you can rock the party.

You have to come in on a professional level to make it, otherwise you just can’t get into rap.

If I do a song where I’m angry, when it’s time to perform it live I’m not mad, I’m happy. I’m at a concert. But I have to somehow drum up that rage. That’s acting.

Ultimately I am happy that everybody is embracing hip hop and the sounds from the streets.

When I was in the 12th grade, I got my girlfriend pregnant. I just got out of school, she was a 10th-grader. I’m a teen parent, and I’m at a point where I’m like, ‘Man...

I ain’t got no beef with east coast, I think it’s just being hyped up.

I’m in a very good place to make records. Needing to make money off music is very dangerous.

I make an effort to keep it as real as I possibly can.

I think when people say ‘real hip-hop,’ they want it more buried in the streets. They want it more connected to the streets and the grime and the roughness of the streets. They don’t want...

‘New Jack City’ was a perfect marriage of music and film. They used a lot of musicians: myself, Christopher Williams. People that were popular because of their music were given the chance to act. And...

When you start a business, go for the lowest hanging fruit.

You have the core hip-hop, which would just be beats and breaks, more something like what you hear with DJ Premier. Then you get into the more highly produced hip-hop, which is something like what...

Being cool is when you win, you don’t get too happy; and when you lose, you don’t get too mad.

Ice-T in the music has done some outrageous things.

AIDS is such a scary thing and it’s also the kind of thing that you think won’t happen to you. It can happen to you and it’s deadly serious.

Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn’t have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn’t write it down on paper....

No, I’ll stay Ice-T. This is what got me here, I’m always going to stay true to that. If it weren’t for hip-hop I wouldn’t be doing all these other things.

Every once in a while, I hear somebody call me Tracy to try to let me know that they know me, you know, personally. But most of my real friends will call me Trey, or...

I’ve never read for a movie, I’ve always been given them.

Redemption just means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong.

As long as I’m around the cats in the hip hop scene, they’ll throw me a track and I’ll write a rap over it.

If I’m going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot...

Because I first made my name as a rapper claiming South Central L.A., people often assume I’m strictly a West Coast cat. But my family was actually from back East. I was born in Newark,...

The music led to the acting. But movies aren’t something you can just will yourself into. Someone has to choose you, and you have to be quite fortunate to be chosen.