A Quote by Ian Brown

Since we were kids, we grow up believing that astronauts are heroes - that to go up in a rocket is a heroic thing. These guys are bigger than movie stars. To me, it's... all a well-dressed-up lie, basically. There's billions spent on rockets up there, and there's millions starving down here. It don't make sense to me.
I remember growing up thinking that astronauts and their job was the coolest thing you could possibly do... But I absolutely couldn't identify with the people who were astronauts. I thought they were movie stars.
For me, my entry point, when I was old enough, was the skinhead/suedehead thing, sort of like '70/'71. People didn't have much money - they would save up, or whatever - but everyone always dressed up. You'd go to a dance at the football club on a Thursday night and all of us kids - all of us from maybe like 12 to 16 - were all dressed up.
I had not grown up on theater - in Hughes, Ark., you went to see a movie on Saturday. So my acting heroes were movie stars. It was a natural thing for me to want to get into the movies.
Kids don't say, "Wait." They say, "Wait up, hey wait up!" Because when you're little, your life is up. The future is up. Everything you want is up. "Hold up. Shut up! Mum, I'll clean up. Let me stay up!" Parents, of course, are just the opposite. Everything is down. "Just calm down. Slow down. Come down here! Sit down. Put... that... down."
For me there is no reason why to go up in weight class, because when you go up in weight class you have to fight bigger guys - then you have to train against bigger guys. The guys are not better, they're heavier, but it means you have more chance to get hurt.
My mornings start with mom coming into my bedroom and waking me up, or trying to wake me up, and then I go back to sleep. Then my mom wakes me up again and yells at me. Then she'll get me to wake up, and I'll get dressed and go to school. We go to school, and my teacher tells me that I didn't do the homework well enough. And that's that.
People are like, "Why are you all dressed up? Did you dress up just for me?" I'm like "No, I dressed up because I'm an adult and I felt like putting on my suit." But I love it. Tom Ford and Ralph Lauren are my two heroes of clothing designers.
Why did I want to be an astronaut? That's not an easy question to answer because I know a lot of kids want to be astronauts when they grow up but it stuck with me and I think just maybe growing up in Houston and always having the astronauts and the Johnson Space Center in my backyard, I was always aware of the space program.
Me and my wife have been on the same kind of routine since we got married, man. Just praying together in the morning, praying at night together. And I think having her, that support right there! I always try to make sure my kids grow up in the right home, I set the right example for them. Because I didn't always have my father there for me and my sister didn't have that either. So I just want to make sure they grow up different. They grow up seeing how marriage is supposed to be and I think that's what really gives me motivation.
When you grow up starving, you cannot point with pride to a book you've just spent six hours reading. Picking cotton, sewing flour bags into clothes - those were the skills my father grew up appreciating.
The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like I’m falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me.
My brother was probably one of the toughest kids from my neighborhood and he didn't make it easy on me. He made sure I was getting beat up as much as possible growing up. If he wasn't beating me up, he was making his friends beat me up.
I think growing up, we always try to make sense of who we are, what we go through, and I grew up in a very religious household. I interpreted what was wrong with me through religious language and I concluded, probably because of a combination of forces around me, that there was something in me that God didn't like or was unhappy with. Since these problems were in large part congenital, that meant that I was doomed from the beginning. I didn't have a chance.
The thing that happened in Washington -- it happened. All you can do is just grow from it. That took a toll on me. That was probably -- I think if I could've bounced mentally out of that situation faster than I did, I would probably still be in the NBA. But since I couldn't understand why they were trying to treat me like that, I basically gave up. I just didn't want to be a part of it anymore.
I did stand-up comedy for 18 years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four years were spent in wild success. I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a byproduct. The course was more plodding than heroic.
I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.
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