Quotes from Ice T

My name, my real name, is Tracy. I always thought I was like a boy named Sue. So I made my friends call me 'Tray.'

So from an actor's perspective, you really have no idea how you're acting.

The next day, I got a phone call from him and he told me to come and read for a movie called New Jack City. So I went over there and they told me I was gonna wear dreads and play a cop.

I think the most successful are the most paranoid. The first thing people do when they buy a mansion is they build the biggest wall you could possibly build around it. What happens is, now you become a target. If I go into the hood, I'm at a disadvantage. They could carry guns. I can't. They can hit me in the face. I can't.

I'll never sell 14 million like Hammer, I just wanna do a good Ice-T show.

Oh man, nobody is as tough as Mr T. Ice T is pretty tough though as well.

I'm a big Brad Pitt fan. He's really talented. I think a lot of men are intimidated by him, saying he's just a pretty boy or whatever, but he is a bad man. I think he can act.

I've always been a person that, if I'm with a woman, she's in the picture. Even my son's mom, she was on my early (album) covers.

My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that's when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt.

Rap music came along and saved my life. I started to tell the stories of the streets and that was my way out.

If you really listen to my music my music is more like stories than party records. I never made party records.

I just don't believe that there's any way that you're ever gonna get one peace, because everybody has different ways of seeing life.

I wouldn't write about sh*t I don't know. You won't hear me write about politics in Africa and stuff, because I don't know enough about it. And I would never rap about something I can't back up.

Now everybody's bloggin'. I heard somebody say, "Blogging is just graffiti with punctuation." Everyone's an authority so there's nobody in power, 'cause everyone thinks they're in power.

A good emcee will rhyme a lot of different ways. Don't limit yourself.

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

I've never been competitive with anybody but myself.

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

You can't come out on a record dissing the system and be on a label that's connected to the system.

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

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, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey.

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.

If one person comes in and says, this is the way life should be, I think you're asking for chaos. I think you gotta let different people live different ways. It's a big world.

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've got to do something.'