Especially the young kids who don’t have any guidance, just stuck on trying to be a tough guy or trying to be a gangster – there are different ways out there to better yourself. You just need the right guy out there to push you.
You don’t have to be a gangster rapper to be successful. You can do anything.
All the great artists had their dark sides. Look at Amy Winehouse or anyone who has achieved a certain level of success. Even Adele, and the people that you wouldn’t put in the same category as a gangster rapper. These women have exposed their vulnerabilities, demons, and things that have hurt them.
When you see my performances, even people that you might have known, like Nicky Barnes in ‘American Gangster,’ you have to get over the fact that I look like Cuba Gooding, Jr. But once you find truth in the performance, if I’m doing my job right, you believe everything.
Maybe it’s stress or anger or adrenaline or disillusionment or a bullying nature or simple fear of getting killed themselves, but there is a problem if a cop cannot tell the difference between a menacing gangster and the far more common person they encounter whose life is a little frayed and messy.
Usually when you hear about rappers in Asia, they always try to be like gangsters and stuff like that and I don’t get it.
I think I could totally be a gangster, but I could never be the kind of gangster that carries things out myself. I would have to be the kingpin that has my minions go and do the dirty bidding. I think I’d be pretty good at giving orders.
People want to classify and say, ‘OK, this is a gangster film.’ ‘This is a Western.’ ‘This is a… ‘ You know? It’s easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t really matter.
You can fail in films because you don’t have the talent, or you have too much humility, or you lack ferociousness. I’m a gangster. If I want something, I’ll grab it.
Before we made films about gangsters, everything was about the royal families. They contain so much drama.
My uncle was a gangster in the real gangster days. I witnessed it, I felt it, I smelt it the situation, I was involved. It was like knowing a movie star.
There are many people who think I’m actually a gangster or a mafioso, largely because of ‘Goodfella.’
It’s funny how the ruthless, murderous gangster has really been romanticized by the media. I mean, I grew up watching the ‘Godfathers’ and ‘Scarface,’ and they were the coolest. They’re just really interesting stories with great characters. They’re rock stars.
I think when people think of Compton, of course, they always think of gangster rap. But if you ever had an opportunity to go to Compton, you would know that Compton is a beautiful city.
I know nothing of what it is to be a gangster.
Ice Cube is doing so great. He went from being this hardcore gangster rapper to this actor now. He’s doing children’s movies and all this stuff – he’s rocking it.
As a child, I was always drawn to heroic characters. I decided I wanted to act when I realised that Superman and all those gangsters and Indians were just real people in costume.
I consciously decided not to be a ‘London’ actor. Those gangster movies made a lot of East End actors think they were movie stars. And I was very aware that they were going to go out of fashion.
We got skate parks in different states, but me skating? Nah, I’m too gangster; I can’t rock with it. But I watch it.
I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there’s the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare.
How did we suddenly become entranced with gangster culture? I saw it this morning on campus. When did the black community say we should all look like criminals?
If you look at my acting career, I never played a role that was similar to anything my brother played. I was always cast as the bad guy or a gangster, because my brother didn’t do those kind of roles.
Giving a record company an album is like giving a gangster your baby or something.
A studio gangster dupes people into believing he’s a tough guy, but in reality he’s the former student body president and member of the National Honor Society. Once Vanilla Ice was fingered as a studio gangster, his career was over. Thank God.
When we die, our souls still live. If you are a gangster or a bastard or a crook, your soul inhabits a donkey or something terrible.
I found ‘Celebrity Gangster’ intense, dramatic, a real page turner.
I like to mumble when I act, ’cause I think it’s more realistic. For some reason, the impediment has given me the accent of a Mexican gangster.
Even after ‘Gangster’ being a success, I was considered a B-grade actress and was a sidekick, even though I was good at what I did, and was jobless for two years.
Gangster films are exciting.
I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he’s now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.
I always think that politicians are worse than the baddest gangsters.
The British establishment sold its soul long ago and welcomes any foreign villain, crook and gangster that has dirty money to invest in the UK, buying luxury homes to fuel the upward spiral of house prices.
I think a lot of rappers limit themselves by doing the gangster movies and that’s stereotypical for a rapper.
When I say I’m going gangster, I’m working really hard at something.
Terre Haute. They used to call it ‘Terrible Hut’ because it was so wide open. Gambling, red light district, speak-easies. I entertained for all the gangsters. Can’t name a gangster that didn’t come into the place where I worked.
I’m a Honey G fan. She can spit some vibes on one of my songs; she’s got rhymes for days! She’s gangster. I love her.
The laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons.
I decided that if the police couldn’t catch the gangsters, I’d create a fellow who could.
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.
We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster’s paradise.
There’s a certain type of person drawn to the gangster world, and they’re generally young men who were predisposed to violence and risk-taking, who like to make a lot of money quickly and wear flashy clothes.
We had an apartment on west side of Central Park. The rent was very reasonable. We found out later that it belonged to a gangster called Legs Diamond and it was a front to his headquarters. It was fine.
Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent development of the normal.
We want ‘McMafia’ to be a tense gangster story but also a family story. It’s a collusion of those two worlds.
I’m trying to bring gangster rap back to the forefront, like in the early ’90s.
Gangster movies are the inheritor of the Greek tragedy: it’s the only genre where the audience will be disappointed if there’s not a tragic ending.
My dad had a real big reputation as being the hard man, street fighter, the gangster. My stepdad was quite timid, and I wanted a bit of the gangster in my life.
I’ve been an actor for 20 years, and I think the first 14 years, it was all struggling. At first, it was all gangsters.
A studio gangster dupes people into believing he’s a tough guy, but in reality he’s the former student body president and member of the National Honor Society. Once Vanilla Ice was fingered as a studio gangster, his career was over. Thank God.
I saw the police thriller The Blue Lamp’ and remember realizing the power that Dirk Bogarde as the gangster exerted over the audience simply by his expressions in the close-ups. I could see how the people around me reacted to him and realized that I wanted to have the same effect.
I’m a dirty south goon – damn right, I ain’t no West coast gangster.
I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
My dad wasn’t a gangster, and he wasn’t a criminal, but he sure liked to rub padded shoulders with them.
We get the impression through film and TV that Americans are violent gangsters with guns or upper-middle-class people in romcoms. I really liked the people. They were really warm. They could have been Brits. I mean that in the nicest possible way.
I’ve played some gangster roles, but that’s obviously not me. When you’re an Italian-American New York actor, it’s just an easy way to get cast.
Old Americana vintage gangster stuff has a fantastical feel; it feels less dirty in a way. It feels like the opera of crime.
I am totally inspired by ‘Godfather,’ one of the greatest films made. Also, I am fascinated by the thought of how someone becomes a gangster and continues to be one.
