Will Smith Quotes

I'm a product of public housing. My parents grew up poor, but their dream was to own a home.

My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.

I grew up with not a lot of money and I definitely shopped at Goodwill. But even in my most unfortunate state, I was really blessed compared to a lot of the rest of the world. I had a really great chance to follow my dreams and have them actually come true.

Real poverty is less a state of income than a state of mind.

Whoever rises to deliver the inaugural Address of 2013 will speak to a nation in which the American Dream is under profound economic and cultural pressure. This is perhaps best measured by the state of the middle class.

I just thank God that I didn't grow up with so much money or privilege because you had to create ways to make it happen.

As the middle class is predated upon with an ever greater malicious intensity, their children stand to lose more and harder than their parents ever did.

No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.

I'm not tortured and neurasthenic - I'm really not.

I don't know how to relax, that's my problem.

But so much of being an actor isn't so great - the auditioning, the rejection, the financial insecurity.

I'm tired of people on trust funds telling people on food stamps how to live.

There are people with no high school education who are poor. but there are also university graduates on food bank lines. There are people who are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned bridges with friends and family — and then there are people who have never taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t make ends meet.

In the neighborhood where I grew up, it was a rough neighborhood - well, not rough, but it certainly wasn't upper class or anything. But I remember hearing things like, 'The little man just can't get ahead.' And if you start to believe that, then you know what? You don't get ahead.

I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but I grew up with a lot of opportunities that many people don't have.

I'm not a super nervous guy in general. I don't live a ton of my life in my head.

I work 12 hours a day, seven days a week - and I love it. I'm creative. I feel fulfilled. I'm from a solidly lower-middle-class background; I'm not from the world that I'm in now. So I appreciate it a lot. I've really got a rich, full life.

Coming from where I come from, I didn't have the luxury of having a trust fund. Or money from generations. Or the luxury of hoppin' into the family business, you know?

You can't be in the zone in front of 12 million people, you've got to be chill.

I come from a poor community, and I still go back there whenever I can, and I think that makes it easier to cope with fame and being on TV.

The middle-class ladder has rungs that no longer exist for many trying to climb higher. Instead, for too many, in too many places, their chore is simply trying to hang on.

Having grown up a trailer park kid on welfare and food stamps, becoming jaded is impossible, although now I make a good living, which I'm not ashamed of; when you've been poor, it never leaves you.

The emotions can take you out of a game.

I didn't have money growing up.

When you're tense and you're forcing the issue, you kind of cloud your vision, so I think just being confident and super relaxed, waiting for my timing, has really helped me.