Metta World Peace Quotes

I think my thing is I grew up in the ghetto, and I was able to get a second chance. That's what I'm trying to tell kids.

I'm living proof that you can make it out of the ghetto.

If I wrote a memoir, it would be like 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'

We lived in a ghetto. I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square. I wound up not getting in trouble. I don't consider myself to be especially wise, but I will say that it's pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don't. I wanted out.

For me, basketball was always about survival because I was just trying to get out the hood, right? When I got to Chicago, I'm like, 'I'm just trying to survive, and anybody I got to step on or break, so be it.'

Growing up, I didn't dream of being nothing, of living in the ghetto my whole life. I wanted to get out.

Growing up in the streets of Bed-Stuy, it was hard, yo.

I came from a real tough neighborhood. I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

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

When I did 'Boyz N The Hood', I never thought how we grew up in South Central was interesting enough for a movie.

In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

If I grew up in 'da hood,' it would make my story so much more interesting - if I had something to escape from. I had a pretty good life. My parents weren't rich; they weren't poor. I wasn't trying to escape from anything. It was always just the pursuit of something cooler.

I try to use my experience and the fact that I grew up in the ghetto - I tell people you don't have to rob or steal to get out of the ghetto.

Spanish Harlem is like every ghetto in America. There's every distraction possible. To make it up out of there is really a task itself.

I'm going to make my own 'Trapped In The Closet' one day, about a black kid growing up in the hood.

I'm from the south side of Nigeria, a place called Port Harcourt City... No one ever makes it out of there. I wanted to put it on the map.

Nobody wanted to be in business with Death Row because, unfortunately, they felt there was an element there that could be dangerous. But I just knew they had great music and that they were a bunch of guys who wanted to make it out of the ghetto. That's something I can understand.

I came from the heart of the ghetto - there ain't no suburbia in me.

Going back about 10 years ago, the only thing a black kid could do to get out of the ghetto was being a sports star. Now we can add music to that, which is a good achievement in itself.

I remember where I was when I first heard 'Boyz N The Hood' - 126th Street and Normandy, South Central, Los Angeles. I remember that I was on my porch. What they described in that song was so vivid and so clear to me because it was the kind of life I was used to witnessing and partly experiencing in my neighborhood.

Money was a big differentiator when I was growing up, but I made sure it doesn't stay that way.

My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance - at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.

When people hear my music, they ain't really hearing about no shiny stuff, the glamorous life. They're going to hear that gritty, slum.

A song about post-teenage angst like 'Mad World' seems to be permanently relevant.