Eminem: "Sometimes I'm real cool, but sometimes I could be a real asshole. I think everyone is like that."

Eminem: "I do say things that I think will shock people. But I don't do things to shock people. I'm not trying to be the next Tupac, but I don't know how long I'm going to be on this planet. So while I'm here, I might as well make the most of it."

Eminem: "I had this whole Slim Shady concept of being two different people, having two different sides of me. One of them I was trying to let go, and I looked at the mirror and smashed it. That was the whole intro of the Slim Shady EP. Slim Shady was coming to haunt me."

Eminem: "I'm certainly not a f*cking fashion consultant. Don't call me if you want to know how to dress. I just rap. That's all I really know how to do."

Eminem: "Trust is hard to come by. That's why my circle is small and tight. I'm kind of funny about making new friends."

Eminem: "A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people. Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I'm joking and when I'm serious."

Eminem: "You're not going to hit it every single time, and that's why, when I record an album, I do probably close to 50 songs. Each song I record has to get better. If it's not better than the last song that I made, it'll usually linger for a couple of months, and then it'll be put on the backburner, and then there'll be another song that I do, and then it often doesn't make it on the album."

Eminem: "Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know, I've written a whole song in an hour."

Eminem: "When I do something I have to do it all the way - that goes for music, with a high-hat, a snare drum, a rhyme, everything. I have to push it to the extreme. That's how I realized I have addictive behavior. Somebody told me this once, that the thing that makes me bad is the same thing that makes me good at other things."

Eminem: "I realize that some people see going away as, 'Oh, he's irrelevant now,' but I feel like if I don't go away, I get sick of myself. It's never been my thing to be in the spotlight all the time."

Eminem: "There was a while when I was feeling like, 'Damn, if I'd just been born black, I would not have to go through all this.'"

Eminem: "I don't like to give the sob story: growing up in a single-parent home, never knew my father, my mother never worked, and when friends came over I'd hide the welfare cheese. Yo, I failed ninth grade three times, but I don't think it was necessarily 'cause I'm stupid. I didn't go to school. I couldn't deal."

Eminem: "Now that I understand that I'm an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it."

Eminem: "You can't control who likes you. If I got Backstreet Boy fans what am I supposed to do? Turn them away? Whoever likes my stuff, likes my stuff but just know Slim Shady is hip hop, I grew up on hip hop, it's the music I love and it's the music I respect. I respect the culture... that's me."

Eminem: "Well, I'm working all the time to stay out of trouble!"

Eminem: "Never take ecstasy, beer, baccardi, weed, pepto bismol, vivarin, tums, tagamet hb, xanax, and valium in the same day. It makes it difficult to sleep at night."

Eminem: "My family has never been there for me. They expect things because we're blood."

Eminem: "We just kept moving back and forth because my mother never had a job. We kept getting kicked out of every house we were in. I believe six months was the longest we ever lived in a house."

Eminem: "It's just hard to meet new people, in my position."