I'm growing as an individual, but your always growing. All of my albums are snapshots of where I am artistically.

I have no confidence issues with the impact or the quality of the music. No one in hip-hop, before this point and to this point, with all due respect, has done this.

Everything's got space between it, the planets, trees, your eyes. Your eyes get too close together, it's a whole different world. You can lose perspective.

I don't wanna get into that space where a lot of guys now, their solo album is like eight or 10 songs with other people, you don't get an idea of who this guy is. I just wasn't interested in that.

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

In my years as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator, I learned an important fundamental lesson: Hostage negotiation is often nothing more than a business transaction.

At some point, I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it; that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.