Trying Quotes

You can tell when someone is just trying to use you. It becomes just someone who's hanging around. Whenever someone sucks up to me, it never goes anywhere because I'm too boring a guy.

What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.

Every different social group that I encountered had its different set of rules, so you learn very quickly how to pick up the nuances and change yourself accordingly. When you are not from anywhere, you have to try to find what's universal. You are always trying to fit in.

I stayed in the East for about a year after I graduated. Then, I came out to Los Angeles and started knocking on doors and working my way up. This was the '70s. I had been told how tough it was for a woman trying to make it in Hollywood, but I sort of had blinders on. I just did things anyway.

Studios have been trying to get rid of the actor for a long time and now they can do it. They got animation. NO more actor, although for now they still have to borrow a voice or two. Anyway, I find it abhorrent.

The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.

I find being an adult very difficult. Being an adult artist, Asian American, incredibly difficult. Or trying, anyway.

If you're trying to hide, avoid using your own name. Have a couple spares that you can pull out of your pocket anytime, the more thoroughly documented the better.

Anytime I write something that's trying to be too smart, it doesn't work.

Everyone wants to grow, but I'm not trying to reinvent myself anytime soon.

Anytime there's an actual grassroots movement that isn't funded by people trying to create a grassroots movement, I find that interesting.

I don't listen to music while writing; it seems to me I'm trying to make my own kind of music, and to have anything else going on is just noisy interference.

If you saw me trying to do laundry or something, well, I'm not really equipped to do anything else.

When I was younger, I was trying to create from attitude more than anything else.

More than anything else I recall being, or trying very deliberately to be, a perfect child. Not a Goody Two-shoes, but a kid who did good, who worked hard and met every expectation. I strove to achieve in the excessive way that psychotherapists tend to regard with concern.

I couldn't imagine trying anything else besides acting. But I didn't know that to make it meant I'd be on a movie screen.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

I never wanted to do anything else, really. I left home at an early age trying to find my voice, my niche in music.

The thing I'm scared of most is not fulfilling my work. There's so much anxiety around trying to get a movie made that you don't really get to be afraid of anything else.

I'm an honest dude, not trying to be anything other than who I am.