Quotes About Struggle

Since the beginning of my recording career in 1975, I have had a little difficulty because the pop stations think I'm a jazzer who doesn't have a feeling for pop, so it's hard to get my records played. Similarly, black urban radio doesn't understand that with my R&B roots, I am more than a jazz singer. So I get pigeonholed.

I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'

I don't have them down here asking me what my urban agenda is. I don't find them really doing in-depth stories on community-based organizations that have been struggling for a long time and who are out trying to get funds. They aren't interested in those stories.

I don't know if it matters what country you're from, size of the city you're from, urban or rural, there are people that are hurting each other everywhere.

I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.

Canada can be tough for urban music.

New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

In 2011, I was in Hollywood peddling 'Sicario' to constant and resounding 'no's. Texas was suffering the worst drought on record. Wildfires spread across West Texas, burning some 4 million acres and 3,000 homes. While the urban centers in Texas were experiencing an economic boom, West Texas was collapsing under the weight of drought and fires.

Years ago, when I was making music, I was sending it off to radio stations and getting told it was 'too urban.' But what else am I supposed to make?

I certainly knew the hard side of urban life, stop-and-search.

I feel like I don't fit in. There's not a lot of outlets for urban music, for black artists who don't have that crossover thing going early on.

To give everyone a house and garden is very difficult in urban areas.

I think the guys who are sort of infantry in Somali piracy are not unlike low-level drug dealers in urban areas in America, who see it as, you know, not having many other options. I think it comes down to money and needing to survive.

Some women have a pulsing energy almost too sharp and salty to endure and when they are in pain their pain is ferocious and shatters all over the place.

I admired so many things about you. Almost everything. But I don't want to wind up like you. I don't want to starve to death, all alone on some island inside my own head. Hopeless.

There's a girl in this dress, there's always a girl in distress.

Women in India experience much worse suffering, humiliation and slavery in all spheres than even the untouchables.

When you find yourself in a very hard situation, a circumstance that holds you by the balls, that's the time you wish you were created a woman!(women don't own balls)

Tell me about yourself - your struggles your dreams your telephone number.

Outside every thin girl is a fat man trying to get in.

Of my two 'handicaps' being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

All women's dresses are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.