Ice T Quotes

"Redemption just means you just make a change in your life and you try to do right, versus what you were doing, which was wrong."

"A good emcee will rhyme a lot of different ways. Don't limit yourself."

"I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in Summit, an upscale town in north Jersey. There was this tiny area of Summit where most of the black families lived. My parents and I lived in a duplex house on Williams Street."

"When I was in the 12th grade, I got my girlfriend pregnant. I just got out of school, she was a 10th-grader. I'm a teen parent, and I'm at a point where I'm like, 'Man I've got to do something.'"

"You can't come out on a record dissing the system and be on a label that's connected to the system."

"I'm on the front line and I am a rapper."

"If it sells, it sells. If it doesn't sell, I'll go make a movie."

"Oh man, nobody is as tough as Mr T. Ice T is pretty tough though as well."

"Every once in a while, I hear somebody call me Tracy to try to let me know that they know me, you know, personally. But most of my real friends will call me Trey, or 'Ice' was basically short for Iceberg. So they would call me - some of my boys call me Berg."

"I think singing and acting go hand in hand. Take an R&B singer: one song says, 'I love you,' the next is, 'Baby, don't leave me', the next is, 'If you leave me I don't care.' You have to drop in and out of different perspectives."

"Jay-Z is like a rap-savant, he doesn't have to write the rhymes down, he can create complex raps in his head. I mean he does memorize it, he just doesn't write it down on paper. He doesn't freestyle onto the track, it's all thought out."

"My mother passed when I was in the third grade, my father when I was in the seventh, and that's when I was shipped to Los Angeles to live with an aunt."

"Ice-T in the music has done some outrageous things."

"When you start a business, go for the lowest hanging fruit."

"I've never been competitive with anybody but myself."

"A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes."

"I've never read for a movie, I've always been given them."

"We have groups that do that, but I can't rap with the mentality of an 18 year old when I'm in my 30's."

"I'm competitive in that I would like to outsell my last record."

"I couldn't possibly have lived all the things that Ice-T on the records lived."

"So from an actor's perspective, you really have no idea how you're acting."

"Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls."

"The next day, I got a phone call from him and he told me to come and read for a movie called New Jack City. So I went over there and they told me I was gonna wear dreads and play a cop."

"As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real."

"I'm a big fan of all styles, even Biggie and Wu-Tang, but I gotta do my thing."

"You have to come in on a professional level to make it, otherwise you just can't get into rap."

"I want to be able to say that a rap career could be ten albums."

"Everything we do helps the new artists in the long run."

"I'll never sell 14 million like Hammer, I just wanna do a good Ice-T show."

"Any New York group can come to L.A. and sell out every show, but an L.A. group who goes to New York might not do the same because the audience hasn't been introduced to the group."