Look inside for highlights from the sit down:

ON “AMBITION”:

“The word ambitious is not allowed to be used around me. Kanye West is nothing if not ambitious. Because ambition, when I hear it, it says that it seems like it’s almost impossible.

…it’s something about the word ambitious that makes me feel like I’m young Venus Williams doing the TV interview when her dad had to come and defend her. If you say, “Yo, it’s ambitious,” I need Venus and Serena Williams’s dad to run up and say, “How you going to say it’s ambitious? He said he was going to do it!” Have I ever not done anything I said I was going to do? I made it back from addiction, I beat the predictions, brought real to the fictions—that’s off the new album.”

ON KOBE BRYANT:

“One thing I thought was really amazing is that we were able to find a groove with the photographs today even as out of it as I was with the loss of Kobe. We were able to just go to the court and play ball. There’s one street that I drive to go from either my office or my home to the property where the domes were built. [Editor’s note: The street is Las Virgenes Road, the site of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight other people just four days prior.] So now there’s no way for me not to be as determined as Kobe every time I drive down that street. It’s game time. There’s no move that we can’t make, or that we’ll wait to make. Everyone in our life is now a member of the Lakers on one of Kobe’s championship teams. The way that Kobe would say that we all have to come together and win this championship is the way I look at life now. To an infinite, other level.

This is a game changer for me. He was the basketball version of me, and I was the rap version of him, and that’s facts! We got the commercials that prove it. No one else can say this. We came up at the same time, together.”

ON VOTING FOR TRUMP:

“Both my parents were freedom fighters, and they used to drink from fountains they were told they couldn’t drink from, and they used to sit in restaurants where they were told they couldn’t eat from. They didn’t fight for me to be told by white people which white person I can vote on. [laughs]

‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ is a victim statement. This white person didn’t do something for us. That is stemmed in victim mentality. Every day I have to look in the mirror like I’m Robert De Niro and tell myself, “You are not a slave.” As outspoken as I am, and the position that I am in, I need to tell myself.Black people are controlled by emotions through the media. The media puts musicians, artists, celebrities, actors in a position to be the face of the race, that really don’t have any power and really are just working for white people. When it’s said like that, it’s kind of obvious, right? We emotionally connect to someone of our color on TV and feel that this person is speaking for us. So let me say this: I am the founder of a $4 billion organization, one of the most Google-searched brands on the planet, and I will not be told who I’m gonna vote on because of my color.

And we know who I’m voting on. And I’m not going to be told by the people around me and the people that have their agenda that my career is going to be over”

*****

Click here to see the interview in full.

[photos courtesy:  Tyler Mitchell / GQ]

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