A picture of me as this super affable sales guy gets painted, but in actuality, I'm pretty driven by hard work and love working with teams. What people discount is, I grew up in a very small blue-collar town in Massachusetts and have basically scrapped my way career wise.
Everybody was a democrat where we grew up. It was a blue-collar town and the democrats represented the working class and the unions. But very, very super-conservative Catholic, very proud immigrant community, very stoic.
I grew up in a very small town in Massachusetts, and it goes without saying that there weren't many Nigerian families in that town, and a lot of people couldn't say Uzoamaka.
If you look at any sitcom that you watch, if it takes place in, say, a small town in Massachusetts, and it's about the dynamics of the people in that town, the showrunner probably grew up in a town like that, witnessed things, and created content.
I find myself feeling like Oscar in 'Sweat' just by virtue of cleaning the tables, wiping the bar down and picking up everybody's glasses - and not making eye contact, because that's the character. These are working-class, blue-collar people. These are the people I grew up with. It gets under your skin.
I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people... some of the hardest-working people I've ever met.
I grew up in a very small town, but it happened to be in western Massachusetts, where there were a lot of gay people. I remember my aunt going to a gay wedding when I was 11, and I thought it was the coolest thing.
I take pride in working very hard. You need to understand that hard work doesn't instantly pay off. My career grew gradually and taught me a lesson every step of the way.
My family is first-generation Nigerian, and we grew up in a very small, suburban town in New England, Massachusetts. So I do understand what it feels like to be an 'only' in that regard.
I started my career as a sales guy in the nineties, when the funnel was controlled by the sales rep, who had all the information the prospect wanted, including pricing and discount options. Now 90 percent of it has swung to marketing. It's self-service and you need to be very, very helpful to see to the top of the funnel. The game has changed a lot.
I think fans cling to me because I'm a blue-collar guy in a blue-collar city.
Music doesn't have to be fancy. I work hard and enjoy the fact that people want to come to my shows. That's simple, but I'm pretty blue-collar about it.
I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work.
Carl Barks was born in Merrill, Oregon, in 1901, grew up in a farming family, and eventually held a number of blue-collar jobs. He knew what it was to be poor and to work hard for a living.
Contrary to public opinion and the image people have of me, I grew up in a very lower-middle-class, blue-collar environment 40 minutes outside of New York until I was 11.
What makes most people comfortable is some sort of sense of nostalgia. I grew up in a small town, and I could count my friends on one hand, and I still live that way. I think I'll die in a small town. When I can't move my bones around a stage any more, you'll find me living in a place that's spread out and rural and spacious.
There's hardly any precedent for a guy like me to have the career that I've had. Because I grew up the way I grew up, I'm an in-your-face kind of guy. I developed that as a defense mechanism to survive in the streets. I do that in Hollywood in the service of my passion.