A Quote by Duff McKagan

When I started going to business school, I started getting calls from my peers asking for my help. I thought, 'Well, there are a lot of people like me who make a bunch of money and just get so scared of it and don't know what to do with it.' I just didn't want to be 60 years old and broke.
For many years I thought, "Well, I need to know a lot more to direct." But I looked around and watched all the people I know directing and thought, "No. I just need to know what I want it to be." Then there will be a lot of people to help me get it to there, especially Bobby Bukowski, he's a brilliant cinematographer.
I started as a GED instructor, I created my own GED program, and I realized that a lot of young people that don’t do well academically. It’s not that they don’t have the competency to do it or the skill set to do it; it’s just that they weren’t motivated to learn. They weren’t interested in school, so I started just talking to students and just really going in on them like, “Yo, this is life or death.”
I just want to leave you with this thought, that it's just been sort of a dress rehearsal, and we're just getting started. So if any of you start resting on your laurels, I mean just forget it, because...we are just getting started.
It seemed to me that a lot of people started going to art school recently because they thought they could be famous and make a lot of money. They might be in for a bad turn.
There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.
As I started getting older and started to learn about the world, my friends would tell me about video games and dirt bikes and stuff, and I'd be like, "Oh, I got none of that." I started asking questions, like, "Why we can't get this stuff?" And it was like, "Well, we work hard to make sure da da da..."
I've produced and gotten to do a lot of optimistic love stories, and that was so where I was at for 10 years in my life. And now I feel like, Okay, now I know how to do that. I want to get scared again; I want to feel the way I felt when I started my company, when I started producing.
I started acting when I was five years old. I found it randomly, through listening to my brother study monologues. I auditorally started memorizing them for no reason, and started repeating them to anyone who would listen to me. And then, I begged my mom to let me do whatever that meant because I couldn't put into words exactly what that meant. It just meant me happy. And then, when I was 11 years old, I realized what I was doing and I looked to my mom and said, "Can I make this something I can do for the rest of my life?" She was like, "Yeah, sure, if you want to." And I was like, "Okay, great! I think I might want to do this forever."
When I started singing, I was going to school. I remember some of the people in school singing, and they had a choir. I would just watch and listen. Finally I started at least attempting to try to do what they was doing. When I was younger, we started going to church. I can't say that we were always, you know, the most church-going people.
When I started out, maybe because I did Thelma & Louise early on - but people were always asking, "Are things better for women now?" I would say, "Yeah, I think so. It seems like it." Then a few years in, I started saying, "I think so. I'm getting a lot of good parts, but I don't know." Then eventually, I was like, "Google it. I don't know, but it doesn't seem great."
I was doing a show at the National Youth Theatre, playing an old man. Before that I had played fat clowns and I thought, 'If I want to have the career I would like, I am going to have to lose weight.' I was just starting drama school, and found I was moving around a lot. I also started to eat sensibly. The weight just dropped off.
When I started going to school, I started getting used to things, like the language. After that, I started adapting to school, friends, and everything. It was really difficult, to start with, but I survived.
Being old didn't seem like an accomplishment. Everyone I knew who was old was like sick or broke. It just didn't look appealing until I moved to L.A. and started interacting with people who were 50+ and still kicking it, having money, living large.
As the population is, in general, aging, there is more interest in what a 50-year-old, a 60-year-old, a 70-year-old, an 80-year-old is like. And one of the things that just naturally started to happen as I got older - and I could feel younger people looking up to me in a certain way and wanting to know things that I knew - I got interested in the women, in particular, who were 20 years older than me. Because I understand in a way that I didn't 20, 30 years ago, how much they know.
A lot of people are scared. It's the way you're raised. The way you've been told your whole life, that you've got to do this and that. Get a job, go to school. So, a lot of people are scared to just do what they really want. They're worried about what people will think and stuff like that. It's just fear.
I worked mostly in television drama for my first few years. I just kept guesting on NYPD Blues and CSI-like stuff, so when I started getting work in comedy, a lot of people in the business would say, 'Oh - I didn't know you did comedy.'
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!