Quotes About Struggle

It's been a very strange trajectory because I struggled for so many years. I mean, I was doing these videos, I was doing these live shows, I had a lot of fans in New York, the press would write about me, but I couldn't get a paying job, and so my father and I were really like a team.

Back in the day, I used to get really upset when people used to say that I didn't really make all my own things - like my art or my videos or whatever. I work really hard on everything, so it used to upset me when people would try to discredit me or say that I wouldn't have what I had without this person or that person.

When we started doing sketch comedy - actually in '91 in Chicago - making your own videos, which we did, took forever. It would take like, a year to make one video. It was just so difficult to edit and just do everything you had to do.

There are a lot of coming out videos of people who are gay or lesbian, and they're so confident. But it made me cry because I'm not that. I don't know who I am 100 percent.

I couldn't get gigs because you need to be 18 in most venues. So I started doing videos. I wasn't thinking about getting a record deal, I just wanted to know if people thought I was good.

I did five videos and we had to cover three black eyes. It seemed like the day before a video, I would get a black eye and we had to cover it.

All my records were dance-oriented, and all the hassle with major labels about changing my records, release dates, videos - everything was out of my hands. I always had to deal with somebody else, and I had a different perspective on a lot of things.

Videos is the worst. Let me make it clear: Videos suck. It sucks making a video. It's happy when it's over and edited and online, but making it, it ain't really too much fun.

When we started, we were in a van and looking for change under the seats so we could buy food. We went from that to having a hit and getting to do things like make music videos with million-dollar budgets.

South Vietnam faces total defeat, and soon.

I'm happy that I'm alive. I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive.

My father left us when I was 10, so I had to make enough money for us to be able to live in a house because my brother went in the service during Vietnam and I was sole support of my mother. And she had no skills, really, except to clean other people's houses. So I had to have a bunch of jobs, you know, as well as music.

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

I went to Kent State basically to avoid going to Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing in the world. I was lost, and trying not to get into a fight every day.

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

I joined the People's Armed Forces in 1961 to 1984, and I was also a soldier in the southern battle of Vietnam during the resistance against the Americans. I went to the battlefield in order to regain national independence.

I'm a Vietnam veteran. I was here when there was no public support, not just for the effort in Vietnam, for the mission in Vietnam, but for our men and women in uniform.

A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as 'Little Vietnam' because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders - as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.

From Vietnam's 'Deer Hunter' to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed.

When I was about 21 and just about to get out of college at NYU, Vietnam was raging, and I was a frustrated musician for a little bit.

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war.

We talk about how hard it is now. But if we look back at the '60s, we actually had a president that was assassinated. We had riots, we had Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the FBI, and the Black Panther war. There was so much happening at the time where it felt like America was coming apart at the seams.

My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn't want to be in and didn't understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.