Ad-Rock Quotes

When you're in your 20s, your 30s, even, you have - at least, I had - vast ambitions, and you sit around mooning about these things, and you're depressed, because you haven't done them. And it takes you a long time to come to the realization that if you can't be John Updike, well, then, you can't.

'The bigtime for you is just around the corner.' They told me that first in 1952 - boy, it's been a long corner. If I don't hit the bigtime in the next 25 or 30 years, I'm gonna pack in the music business and become a full-time gigolo.

You want good ratings, you want people to like the show, you want to be appreciated for the hard work you put in. You don't always get it. Every show is not beloved.

The Band is sounding real good. We've been doing some dates together and they've been going well.

Losing feels worse than winning feels good.

I always thought my records were number one; it's just the charts didn't think so.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

I've been gone for a long time. I really want to give the fans something that they deserve to have. So, I'm working really hard on this. I really want to make it the best work I've done so far.

I've done well, I've been disappointed, and I think it all goes back to you. Of course the labels are going to be the labels. It's the music business. You are a business. That's what they do. So you've got to protect yourself.

When you say 'failure,' that seems really dramatic, but a lot of failure is just really depressing and mundane. I remember the first time I ever played a concert in Italy. I played a venue that held 900 people, and I think five people showed up. It wasn't a big, 'John Carter of Mars' type failure. It wasn't dramatic; it was just depressing.

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.

There's two kinds of rock n' roll casualty: the one that has huge success and adoration, and then suddenly it stops. Or there's when you're in a band: it is all-consuming, so then you have the dream of that, and then the dream's taken away from you even before it happens.

I love being a member of KISS.

To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.

It sucks to be the runner-up because I've been the runner-up for a long time in my career. I would get so close and then lose a huge movie and sometimes it's one kid who beats you out for three different movies. It's so frustrating at the time, but what's so great is the lesson you take from that, which is, 'I've got to get better.'

I never felt like I had made it.

Sometimes you can do all the right things and not succeed. And that's a hard lesson of reality.

I'm planning a different show, though for obvious reasons some of the material will be the same, and of course I will perform material from the new CD.

Anyway, it fell through because they ran out of money. That was when I learned not to waste your time getting your hopes up or to believe something until it actually happens. We broke up for various reasons, but it was a good band. Jim and Don produced some magical music.

Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it.

Having a show get canceled is like, 'Oh, you have caviar between your teeth,' you know what I mean? Because you had a show in the first place.

I was sure I'd set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth - that I hadn't set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if 'The Big Trail' had been a success and launched me as a star.

You were always told that if you worked hard, you would get somewhere. But so many people feel they have worked hard and they have nothing to show for it.

If you think about it, there are a lot of parallels between a sportsman's journey and the acting journey. You face so much adversity and disappointment, and you can work incredibly hard for a long time with very little results, and then, hopefully, something happens.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of 'Lives of Girls and Women,' I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.