Dustin Lance Black Quotes

I might have been born in a hovel but I am determined to travel with the wind and the stars.

I came from a middle class family hence I had to struggle hard for success.

All I would say is it doesn't matter where you come from. Like, Jim Sheridan comes from the inner city, and he's one of the top ones, a top lad.

I've been able to reach from the streets to the suites.

I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.

My father came from nothing, so he believed that people could do anything if they worked hard enough. I think he liked that I chose to be an actor. Both he and my mom were totally supportive.

The main reason I wanted to be successful was to get out of the ghetto. My parents helped direct my path.

In the early days, I had everything to prove. A very working class lad with a burning ambition. A very crude way of measuring success is how much you are worth.

If you were brought up in the '40s, a kid in Ossining, New York, hanging out at the poolroom and stealing, how can you think, 'Here I am in Ossining. I, too, can be a movie star!'

You gotta flex. You gotta look good, bro. Especially coming from the outskirts and wanting to take over the whole Atlanta.

I had a pursuit different from others because they all came from downtown areas with money, but I didn't have any. All I wanted is to change my destiny with my own efforts.

I became a writer in spite of my environments.

People ask how can a Jewish kid from the Bronx do preppy clothes? Does it have to do with class and money? It has to do with dreams.

When I was at school, most people were planning on going to university and becoming doctors or lawyers. I wanted to be a singer, and I was laughed at. It was tough, but I never let anything stop me.

Where else but in America could a schoolteacher from Kansas City end up the governor of her adopted state?

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

I came from nothing really to something; I came from the gutter to making the gutters.

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in Brooklyn. It's what gave me my drive to succeed, the upward mobility I've been after my whole life.

I didn't want to be nobody, and that was the only way I could be somebody was to do stand-up.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

If I didn't mould my reality then I'd still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare.

I come from a council estate in Tower Hamlets, and by no means am I the only person who has done well - one of my friends is head of year in a great school in Twickenham. Another is a writer; another is an artist, a musician.

As a kid, I remember wondering why we lived in an apartment, not in a brownstone, and why we drove an LTD, not a Cadillac. Even now, I'm like that. If I'm on the 5th floor, I will wonder why I'm not on the 6th floor. But that was my drive. I was obsessed with my family having a better life.

Both my parents are first-generation success stories.