The most important thing, in anything you do, is always trying your hardest, because even if you try your hardest and it’s not as good as you’d hoped, you still have that sense of not letting yourself down.
Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.
Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.
I’m already popular in my city. I was just trying to get rich. Man, I’m not gonna lie to you; I didn’t really want to go back to school. I mean, my family was mad about that. Because, you know, you tell your family you want to rap, and they look at you like you’re crazy.
I believe the Champions League has all that magic because it gathers all the best European teams, and that gives you the feeling of trying to be the best. That’s why the Champions League has this special kind of emotion.
I think we were trying to get off Combat from the moment we were on Combat.
I would stay in my room for days, for days at times, just trying to get it together, to know what my next phase was going to be.
Forecasting our futures is built into our psyches because we will soon have to manage that future. We have no choice. No matter how often we fail, we can never stop trying.
Bad guys have always been my bag… I look mean without even trying.
The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.
I’m not trying to be something that I’m not, and I think a lot of people can relate to that. They want something that’s real, and I think I give that to them.
Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.
O man you are busy working for the world, and the world is busy trying to turn you out.
I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.
I’m open to trying multiple different types of styles.
When we are trying to come up with new health laws, you bring doctors, you bring experts in medicine. In urban planning, you bring the best architects. How it is possible that when we are talking about the way we are going to feed America, no chef shows up in the room?
They say a midget standing on a giant’s shoulders can see much further than the giant. So I got the whole rap world on my shoulders, they trying to see further than I am.
I’ve been a bad boy trying to be a good man my whole life.
I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.
Learning to love yourself is not going to happen overnight – the first step is trying to be kinder and more patient with yourself, and I understand that it takes time.
When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.
Failure is not a crime. The crime is not trying.
I’ve always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We’re not protesting from the outside. We’re inside.
Successful people will always tell you you can do something. It’s the people who have never accomplished anything who will always discourage you from trying to achieve excellent things.
It may not necessarily reflect my current frame of mind. Sometimes I have to put myself at the point in time of the voice that I’m trying to sing with.
We’re in a world where masculinity, especially with these big spectacle movies, is often pushed by rippling six packs and forcing an image down someone’s throat trying to prove masculinity. Whereas I think true masculinity comes from having a strong sense of self.
All musicians practice ear training constantly, whether or not they are cognizant of it. If, when listening to a piece of music, a musician is envisioning how to play it or is trying to play along, that musician is using his or her ‘ear’ – the understanding and recognition of musical elements – for guidance.
Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.
I don’t have time for their judgement and their stupidity and you know they lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and look at their loser lives and then they look at me and they say, ‘I can’t process it’ well, no, you never will stop trying, just sit back and enjoy the show. You know?
I’m a conservative. I voted for Donald Trump and back in 2016 everybody was talking about, ‘Oh my God, here’s another TV character trying to run for the presidency.’ They didn’t really take him seriously.
Never die easy. Why run out of bounds and die easy? Make that linebacker pay. It carries into all facets of your life. It’s okay to lose, to die, but don’t die without trying, without giving it your best.
Why is she Mrs. C.J. Walker? It really was a matter of her trying to insist that people respect her, because during that time, white people would call any black woman ‘Sally.’ ‘Aunt Sally.’ So this was like… you can’t call me that.
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
I’m just trying to play my best and have fun.
Coming home, we stopped for a bite to eat and ran into a confused waitress. Had a heart-rending time trying to speak the Words of Life to her, and as I think of all this country now, many just as confused, and more so, I realized that the 39th Street bus is as much a mission field as Africa ever was.
Always trying new things is always more fun, and it can be scary, but it’s always more fun in the end.
As a Latino growing up in Spanish harlem, it’s not easy trying not to be hot-headed.
You just have to keep the same mentality of trying to prove yourself every single day. But it’s a lot of easier when you have people telling you how bad you are than when people are telling you how good you are.
I think that I am lucky and blessed to have the job that I have, and I am trying to create longevity. If that means that I transition into different things at different points in my life, then that’s fine. I also believe that if doors don’t open, make new doors, so I’ve also started producing quite a bit of things.
I want to be the voice of the people; black, white, everyday, oppressed people. A person trying to make it and to do it right.
A lot of what I’ve done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough, and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise – the idea being if you can get behind that wall, you find there’s a pearl inside.
The concept with Off-White is that I have no ideal target. It’s more about trying to make something for everyone. And I think that’s what helps make it unique. That there isn’t a specific muse.
In barely one generation, we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them – often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
My father once said, ‘If you’re in the desert and you’re dying of thirst, are you going to drink a glass of blood or are you going to drink a glass of water?’ I think what he was trying to say, interesting coming from my blood father, is sometimes there are people in your family that can be toxic.
I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.
People change with time. There are things that happened to a person in his childhood and years later they seem to him alien and strange. I am trying to decipher that child. Sometimes he is a stranger to me. When you think about when you were 14, don’t you feel a certain alienation?
We are trying to construct a more inclusive society. We are going to make a country in which no one is left out.
Some people feel, you make your case, if they listen to you, fine, if they don’t, that’s it. That’s not what leadership is. Leadership is trying to continue to make a case.
Hopefully, there’s a place in music for Tinted Windows. If we’re really trying to be iconic, we should just stop right now. If one of us could die, that would also help. But I don’t think anybody wants that gig.
The idea of getting old is horrific, but I don’t want to make it worse by becoming a grotesque caricature. A lot of people have made that mistake of trying so hard to hang on to their looks that they make themselves look really scary.
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write ‘War and Peace’ in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.
