A Quote by Nate Burleson

I was in the process of growing dreads, they were down to my lip. I could whip them back and forth. Then I just thought to myself, "Is this really me? Can I really do this?" So I washed them out and went to the barber shop. I told them to give me a mohawk. But then there was this teenager also getting one. I couldn't do that.
I just figured that, for me to get the best out of myself and do the right thing by myself, I really just needed to step away and find out what I really wanted to do and hopefully getting back to where my people are from and getting out bush could really re-energise me and help heal those wounds.
And I really also wanted to have the full-body scans to learn if it was anywhere else - and it wasn't - before I told them. So I didn't tell them, until for a week, and then I told them.
When I started doing advertisements, I really enjoyed the whole process of shooting, and I realised that I could do the little bit of acting required quite easily. My directors also told me that I have a flair for acting and that I should polish it and try for films. Then I thought I probably had it in me - why not give it a shot?
I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."
If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
People do ask me for advice for some reason. And I'll just kind of pose it back to them and let them answer on their own. I never like to give my advice 'cause I don't want them to come back and 'You were wrong! You ruined my life!' so it's more about 'Hey, this is what you just told me. What does that sound like to you?'
The thought of continually eating something like macaroni, spat out by machinery, fills me with fear and revulsion, so I make macaroni sculptures. I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this 'obliteration.'
I think me, as a leader, as a guy that's been cut, been humiliated, embarrassed, whatever you put on it, I think it's important just to embrace the guys around you, really support them, encourage them and then kinda give them that confidence. Let them know that you believe in them, and hopefully they'll get to believing in themselves.
With Mr. Bungle, I'd lay down a really rough demo of my vocals and then play them for the guys without telling them what I was saying. Our drummer at the time had the coolest takes on what he thought I was saying, so I'd ask him to write out what he thought the lyrics were.
The nice way to meet a guy is through getting to know them first. Then you can really judge their personality. What I can't take is meeting someone, going on a date, getting to know them, then finding out they're a complete psycho - 'Great, I've just wasted all this time on you!'
One of the first things I do with people is help them figure out what their limiting beliefs are and then encourage them to question, "Well, do I really want to keep that one? Is it limiting me? Does it not fit me? Is it holding me back?"
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Coming out of graduation, I didn't immediately know what direction I wanted to do so I decided to just stay as an intern until it really kind of dawned on me and I felt more compelled one way or the other. So I gave it a few years and then after two years it was really clear that deep down I missed being a full time creative artist. Ironically, I started getting clients who were all in the entertainment industry and a lot of them were in comedy!
I am a lip person. I constantly need a really good lip moisturizer with me. Mine is a Clairin's moisture replenishing lip balm. I have two of them: I have one I keep next to my bed, so it's the first and last thing in the morning and evening, and then 10 times a day in my purse.
Grandad taught me that the alien signs and symbols of algebraic equations were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were three-dimensional, and you could approach them from different directions, look at them from different ways, stand them on their heads. You could take them apart and put them back together in a variety of shapes, like Legos. I stopped being scared of them.
I tell people to look at me and understand that everybody first told me that I couldn't be a 6-foot, 9-inch point guard, and I proved them wrong. Then they told me I couldn't be a businessman and make money in urban America, and I proved them wrong. And they thought I couldn't win all these championships, and I proved them wrong there as well.
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