Quotes About Struggle

I was a journalist, but I was starving. And I've written fiction, but I couldn't get a publisher. So, I was basically a very frustrated creative person working in advertising, and even there, I have a great idea that client won't buy it.

I'm basically a starving artist.

When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

When I left my grandmother's home in 1986 headed to Savannah State with two brown grocery bags filled with my belongings, nothing was going to keep me from realizing my dreams.

Satisfaction isn't a state that comes easily to me.

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control.

It is true that the battle for secularism must be fought in the hearts and minds of people, but how does one reach out to the hearts and minds in a fascist state?

When I stated playing as a kid the centre-back would pass to me and I couldn't catch it.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.

One of the stated values at IronPort was 'work/life balance,' but I wasn't living it. I was rarely home. And when I was home, well, let's just say I wasn't particularly helpful or cheery.

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.

When you look at guys who get recruited, most of the best athletes, they come from poor families. I don't forget. I was a junior looking through my mother's stuff and looked at her bank statement, and we had $30 in the bank.

And I think the first LP was perhaps too precious. It was our life's work up to that point; there was so much pain in trying to make the perfect statement. We couldn't relax and I think most people missed what we were trying to say.

Both my mother and my father grew up in Asia, in a time of political instability. They'd earned college degrees before setting foot in the States but had to work menial jobs early on in order to make ends meet.

I never interned. The first job I ever had was a very low-paying job, and the guy running the radio station was so poor, he couldn't pay us sometimes - so it's almost like an internship, right?

Yes, it's hard to stay in shape, but it's also hard to raise kids. That doesn't mean you get to drop them off at your local fire station when they get to be a handful.

In 1974 when I was 22 years old, I was working for $95 a week at WSPB, which was an Atlanta Braves-affiliated AM radio station in Sarasota, Florida. Fresh out of Northwestern University, I was the news director at the station, and my main bread and butter was to handle updates during the morning and afternoon drive times.

The first boss to give me a shot on-air left the station not long after I started reporting. The next boss fired me, and told me I was the worst person he'd ever seen on TV and that I would never make it. That felt like being punched in the gut repeatedly! But I pulled myself together and kept fighting for my dream.

The problem we have is that, some people call it 'too rock' to play on a jazz station, and it's 'too jazz' to play on a rock station. So it's difficult. It's difficult to make it playing this kind of music.

I've never come into anything successful before. I've always been hired by horrible radio stations with horrendous reputations and nothing to lose.

I had spent many days hungry; had slept on railway stations at times because I did not have money to pay for a hotel room... there were moments when I felt I had compromised my dignity as a human being and as an actor.

I couldn't get my album played over the so-called smooth jazz stations. Jazz stations would not play it. You don't always know who you're making that soul connection with.

During the time that my recording career seemed to be in a slump a music called disco came on the scene and literally took over radio stations as well as having radio stations created to play it which sort of negated my music as well as that of some of my peers.