Some notable quotes from Ice-T's autobiography "Ice":

MY FATHER, who was a church-going, nine-to-five guy“”did his best to raise me on his own after my mother died. My aunt who lived right behind us helped to raise me, too. My father also had a housekeeper named Miss Sanoni“”she was from the Deep South“”and she would come over every day and cook these Southern dishes for dinner. So they all chipped in to raise me. Well, raise me? That's kind of a stretch. Wasn't too much raising going on. Just like my mother, my father wasn't much of a talker. He was more of a supporter. The bills were paid. I ate. Nurturing? Naw. That wasn't my pops' style. Nobody in my immediate circle talked to me much. Nobody asked about how I was feeling. That's the main reason that, these days, I talk to my kids a lot. I talk to my wife a lot. But in my house as a kid, there was just not a lot of conversation. My parents and my aunts weren't made in that let's-talk-it-out mold.

As far as parenting styles go, my dad was a real old-school dude. One evening stands out in my mind. My father, Miss Sanoni, and I were at the kitchen table, finishing up dinner. My pops said something to me, and for some unknown reason, I decided I wanted to mumble something back. This was the first time in my life I tried to talk back to him and say something fly. I said it so quiet, I thought I got away with it. But when I stood up, my father stood up, too. I can still remember the way the legs of his chair screeched on the linoleum. He took one step toward me and he hit me square in the solar plexus. Boom. My knees buckled, and in slow motion I fell to the kitchen floor. Knocked all the breath out of me. Then he stood over me. “Boy, you talk shit to me when you can whoop me.“ That's the way it was done. He didn't give me a spanking or a slap in the face. He hit me like a grown man. He was putting me in check, trying to show me what happens to men in the real world when they talk shit. You see a lot of people on the Internet talking mad shit, because if they did the same thing in a room full of people there would be repercussions. If that was a face-to-face conversation, somebody would step to them, hit them in the solar plexus, and have them doubled-up on the ground.

My dad was teaching me a real valuable lesson, one I never forgot: Never mumble some sarcastic shit to somebody who obviously can fuck you up.

Yeah, I was detached. But looking back on my childhood, I don't think there was an attachment. In other words, even when I was a little kid and I'd fall off my bike, skin my knees and want to cry, there was nobody to really cry to. So I learned to suck it up really quick. I'd hit the ground, dust my ass off and not show anybody that I was fucked up. I wasn't one of these kids who was always coming home with hurt feelings, running to hug my mother. None of that clingy, emotional shit was my reality. I grew up in a non-affectionate household. I think kids are trained to know what they're going to get, and once they get a taste of it, they'll always want more. It's like that shit with Pavlov's dog. If you cuddle a kid a lot, he'll want more cuddling. If you don't, he'll just accept that as his reality. He doesn't look for the added affection. Everybody in the family was bugging out that I didn't cry when my father died. They remembered how I hadn't shed a tear for my mother, either. But I just wasn't built like that. Wasn't wired like that. I didn't have an ounce of self-pity in my bones. It didn't hit me, Damn, I'm an orphan. Even as a twelve-year-old kid, I knew I was going to have to make it on my own, and my survival instincts were kicking in.

I was deep enough in the life to understand one crucial thing about the gang life: The flip side of the violence and negativity is the love. And that's some extreme love. Extreme love. I only realized this recently: When I got to Crenshaw High, that's the first time I'd ever heard someone say love to me. My aunt never said she loved me. My mother and father were never big on that word. You get to Crenshaw, and you got a male friend saying, “Cuz, ain't nothin' never fin' to happen to you, homey. You safe, cuz. I love you.“ That's some heavy shit. Like a lot of the homeys, I was getting something I wished I'd gotten from my father. When I was a little kid and something happened to me, I didn't want my dad to call the police. Fuck that. I wanted to say, “Go get 'em, Dad!“ Of course, hardly anybody has it like that in real life, but every little kid wants to believe that his pops is Superman. And that protection you get from the gang is something most people in the 'hood don't get from their families. To me, it's interesting that some of the kids who came from big families, families with four or five brothers, didn't need to join the gangs. Because they had that unconditional protection. “Yo, don't fuck with me“”I got a couple of brothers that will come see you, nigga.“ I didn't have that big family structure. And like everybody else, I wanted that feeling that someone had my back. Yes, the first I really heard love expressed was with the Crips. Not only heard the word “love,“ but saw it firsthand. Saw it manifested. Saw that if you fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us. That's very enticing. That's very attractive to a young brother. It's human nature. We've always had armies and tribes, teams and squads. That sense of loyalty, brotherhood, love“”it's very primal, it's at the core of what it means to be a human. And it's authentic love“”as real and as deeply felt as any love out there“”but it's just misdirected in gangs.

From the minute we woke up, we were constantly scheming to rob someplace. Pulling licks. We'd stand around, playfully taunting each other. “What? You scared of money? Nigga, you scared of money?“ That one phrase sent more people to prison in my neighborhood than anything else.

There's something civilians often don't realize about the military. You're really only trained to do two things: Kill people and take over shit. You're not coming home with too many other useful skills, unless you plan on becoming a police officer. Today, we've got young vets touching down from Iraq and Afghanistan who've killed a shitload of people, and if they're not properly reprogrammed to come back into society, it's not like that “kill switch“ is an easy thing to turn off.“¦

We snatched all the furs and disappeared into the catacombs, moving too fast for any pursuit. We got outside and were laughing because we'd got away so easily. As I looked at the mountain of mink and fox coats, I was already doing the mental calculations and figured they were worth maybe $50,000. We could sell them that same night for about $10,000. We started loading and stuffing all the minks into the trunk, backseat, and front seat and got into our car. We couldn't see out the windows because the mink was piled all the way up. The driver had to clear a little rectangular space so he could see where he was going. When we pulled away in the car, people kept staring at us and laughing, because we looked like a fucking furball driving down the street.

CHUCK D ONCE SAID, “Ice-T is the only person who does things that completely jeopardize his career just to stay awake.“ Once I get something going well, I'll risk fucking it up just for the action. I'm not a cat to stay on cruise control. I hate the idea of being in a comfortable groove. I'll have my rap game going good, and say fuck it, now I'll do a hard rock record. I'll get that rock thing going good and say, fuck it, now, I'm gonna act. No, I never think about it as jeopardizing my career. That's just how I'm cut. Even in school, I always loved going against the grain. I loved doing shit that everyone told me not to do. Right now, I'm thinking I might branch out into standup comedy. Who knows? I like to keep shit moving. Chuck could be right “¦Â maybe I do it to keep myself awake.

To me, the idea that the content of New Jack City had these kids wilding out is total bullshit. If a dude is going to shoot another dude at the movies, that's been in his heart long before he sits down in the fucking theater. And more than likely, they already have some existing beef.

But among us all there are only two box office draws: Will and Latifah. That's real talk. I'm no box office draw. I may have a bit of TV buzz“”I know Dick Wolf respects my game“”but to be categorized as one of those A-list Hollywood actors who can get a movie green-lit on your name alone, to negotiate your deal so that your name appears above the title, that's real juice. That's clout. Of black male actors from the hip-hop generation, only Will Smith has got it like that. For the rest of the rappers, yeah, you can be in the movie, get a juicy part, a sizable check, and your own trailer on the set“”but don't get it twisted: You ain't the reason folks paid ten bucks and sat their asses down in that multiplex theater.

“GODDAMN, WHAT A BROTHER GOTTA DO TO GET A MESSAGE THROUGH TO THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE?“ “”“BODY COUNT“

Back in the day, you had to do shows on a regular basis just to get a record deal. They used to make new artists have a showcase just so all the record executives and “taste-makers“ could watch them perform live. Either that, or you'd be an undiscovered artist playing at a little club, and some A&R guy would decide if you could rap live before he even thought about signing you. These days, all that shit is backward. In the age of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and home studios with ProTools, so many artists put their own music out there and start grassroots promotional campaigns before they've ever left their bedroom or garage to perform that shit. Their first time performing live is when they've already become stars; they've got their recording and only later create a live show around themselves. I'm not saying our generation was better; it's just different. People thought MTV changed up the music business, putting the emphasis on the artist's look rather than how he sounded; but that's nothing compared to what a forum like YouTube has done. In the documentary I just shot, The Art of Rap, I say, “First we were in the audio age, now we're in the video age.“ You see someone's YouTube clip“”some no-name kid who's got a million hits before you've ever heard of them in the mainstream. The whole music game has become much more visually driven than audio. Back in the day, you'd hear a band's song a long time“”months and months“”before you even knew what they looked like.

It was during our first gig in Italy that some real craziness popped. The thing about playing a rock gig in Italy“”which I didn't know at the time“”was some of the fans were a bit behind the curve. Back in the day, the old punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash used to tour Europe, and the Italian punks, just like the English punks, used to spit on them. Freaky as that sounds, unloading a big gob of spit on your heroes was a sign of respect. Punk turned everything upside down that way. That was back in the mid-seventies, before AIDS, before everyone was freaked out about bodily fluids. These punks in Italy never got the memo that spitting was played out, and when we opened up our Italian tour these cats in the Milan arena were still on that trip. In the middle of the stage, I grabbed the microphone and laid it down. “Dig,“ I said. “You can go ape shit, you can jump on the stage and wild out“”I don't give a fuck! But one rule: Don't fucking spit!“ Most places they understood it, but maybe the Italians didn't understand my English. We soon found there were a few of these cats“”soccer-hooligan-looking dudes“”who were still into that spitting game. We're into our first song and these dudes in the front row are spitting at us. Now I'm getting offended. Because number one: I'm not the Dead Kennedys or Jello Biafra. And number two: This ain't no 1977. Dog, spitting is fucking nasty“”I don't know what kind of diseases you got in your fucking mouth. Actually, the spit hadn't touched me yet. But from the first song, this one group of fans is steady spitting on Ernie. He's playing guitar right near the edge of the stage and there's this actual waterfall of saliva going over in his direction. A few songs later, as we're getting ready to go into “Cop Killer,“ I walk over to Ernie. His guitar is drenched in spit. Ernie says, “It's mostly that one motherfucker in black right there.“ I see this kid in a black T-shirt, stringy black hair. They're not even punk rockers, just some young asshole Italian kids. I looked at the kid in the black. He responds by spitting right on me. Okay, cool, I got this. At that moment, I forgot I was Ice-T, forgot I was onstage, forgot every goddamn thing. I just had to fuck this kid up. I went out to the edge of the stage. The stage didn't have a pit, it just had a gate, and I was able to get right out there to the edge above the kid in the black T-shirt. “Yo!“ I shouted. “Everybody put your hands in the air!“ And when they all put their hands in the air, I just leaned over and clocked the dude in his fucking nose. And I hit him hard! So hard he fell back into the audience. I was pissed off, pumped full of adrenaline and I just crashed him. I clocked him, and he fell back and I yelled “Cop Killer!“ And then Ernie and the rest of the band launched into “Cop Killer.“ The kid I hit was still down on the ground, but as I turned, a couple of his friends grabbed my arm and tried to pull me down into the crowd. One Italian kid tried to sock me, so now I'm fighting with about four or five of them. They're on the other side of the gate, and we're fighting over the edge of the gate. I've got tunnel vision: All I see is the mic stand. I grabbed it and started swinging, beating down motherfuckers. I'm cracking motherfuckers left and right. It was crazy, the song was halfway finished“”I'm not singing, just swinging like a madman. The Italian crowd was getting heated, and I'm yelling “Yo! Yo! Yo!“ hoping to keep things calm. But then the crowd started to sing their soccer chants. Hundreds of them in unison doing these straight-up we're-gonna-kill-you chants. We had to break the fuck out“”mid-song. The band threw down their instruments. I dropped the microphone stand. We all ran backstage. The promoter had to shut the concert down immediately. Lights up. Security shoved the whole crowd outside. We stayed in the dressing room for a long time, trying to wait out the mayhem, but the mob wasn't calming down. If anything they were getting more heated. The whole band sat backstage, not sure what to do. The venue had only one exit“”right out the front. The back of the arena led to a cliff, so there was no other way out. We sat there, sweating, glancing at one another. After about thirty minutes, I sent one of our roadies to do recon. He came back looking even more scared. “Ice, the tour bus is fucked up. I don't know how we getting out of here.“ They fucked up our tour bus, rocking it back and forth, slashing the tires, smashing the windows. “There still a lot of people outside?“ “About two hundred.“ “Are they mad?“ “They're not waiting on autographs.“ We sat there, trying to figure some way out, listening to the mob chanting. D-Roc had this brilliant plan to get us out the back of the venue, but because of the cliff, we ended up doing this long walk along the back of the venue, doubling right back to where we started. We didn't do fuck-all except walk a big perilous circle. Then I told the promoter to call us about six cabs, and when they showed up, I said, “Okay, please“”can we get the fuck out of here?“ “We'll run out fast“”heads down,“ the promoter said. “Ice-T, you go last.“ “Fuck that,“ I said, “I'm going first. They want my fuckin' head. They're after me.“ We looked out front. Off to one side of the building, the crowd had started a big bonfire, so we didn't have much room to navigate. We knew they were going to shower us with bottles, rocks, bricks, anything they could hit us with. I started flashing back to my Rangers training. “Yo,“ I said, “we gotta handle this like an ambush. They're trying to funnel us into the kill zone. That means the only thing we can do is attack the strongest position.“ Sean E. Sean, Beatmaster V, D-Roc, the Italian promoter“”they were all staring at me like I was insane. “No, listen. This is the only way. We're going to run straight into the hurricane. If we get past the strong shit, we'll be safe.“ We made our first direct assault. It was me, Sean E. Sean, Ernie, and the promoter. We dashed straight into the mob, and this brick came flying at us. Missed me by about five feet. Bottles are smashing; they're all screaming, but we somehow made it to the cab, with mobs of pissed-off Italians in hot pursuit. We piled into the taxi, but the cabdriver was so freaked out, he jumped out and ran away! The mob surrounded the cab, but now we had no driver. The promoter was in the passenger seat, me, Ernie, and Sean E. Sean were in the back. The promoter was too scared to take the wheel, but I reached forward and smacked him in the head two times. “Drive the car, muthafucka!“ The promoter slid over to the wheel. “But where“”?“ “Just floor it!“ I said. So we stole that cab. Drove straight into the crowd. People were slamming their hands on the windows, dudes were bouncing off the hood. We didn't have a plan, just bashed our way out of the danger zone. We wound through the dark streets of Milan, until we were about a mile away from the venue. Then I realized that in addition to possible assault and inciting a riot charges, we were not doing ourselves any favors by driving around in a stolen taxicab. We jumped out in the middle of the street. I ordered the promoter to take the cab back to the venue before we found ourselves looking at grand theft auto“”or whatever was the Italian legal equivalent. We walked along these medieval Italian streets, almost deserted now. It's pitch-black outside, and we were all wearing our black Body Count coats. Suddenly, I realized that we must look like one of the marauding gangs in The Warriors. “Oh shit! We've got our colors on. Take them shits off, man! The whole city's fucking after us!“ We flagged down another cab, and as soon as we got in, the idiot smiled from ear to ear. “Oh! You Americans? Let me take you to this very cool concert happening right now. Ice-T!“ He tried to pull a U-turn to take us back to the venue until we started screaming for him to drive us to the fucking hotel. We made it back to the hotel and bunkered down for the night. All night the Italian radio and TV kept blaring a news flash: “Rapper Ice-T beats his fans up!“ After a few hours without any sleep, we slipped out of the hotel. We had to catch a train to Rome. We walked through the city all huddled up, wearing ball caps and hoodies, and got on the train. A few hours later we finally arrived in Rome, went straight from the train station to meet up with the country's number one rock DJ. We were told he was the most popular and most influential radio personality in Italy. In the few hours of our traveling, the media had blown the episode up even further. The press was making it like I was disrespecting all of Italy. We went into the studio. The DJ and I shook hands and he went right on the air live. Talking lightning-fast in Italian. All I could catch were a few syllables “¦Â “Ice-T“Â “¦Â “Body Count“Â “¦Â “Milano “¦“ Then he flipped into English and asked me what happened. “Man, we were having a great show. Then guys in the front row were spitting on us. I asked them several times to stop spitting on us. Long story short, I ended up punching a guy in the face.“ I didn't know how this DJ was going to react. But he flipped the script. I later found out what he told his audience in that staccato Italian: Look, Italy, we love Ice-T. What did we expect him to do? This is why we love Ice-T. 'Cause he's a gangster. Because if you disrespect him, yes, he will punch you in the face! Some clowns tried to ruin his concert. We should be angry at them. Ice-T is a guest in our country, we invited him to do all these sold-out shows, and we love him! So he flipped the whole shit on the assholes who'd been spitting. We'd escaped the Milan mayhem and we needed him to squash the situation for the next shows we had to do. There was a real risk the rest of our European tour would go up in smoke. But due to him being the man, he was able to flip it 180 degrees. Instead of the line playing in the media that Ice-T had disrespected Italy, he made it clear that a handful of idiots had disrespected Ice-T. We drove through the narrow Roman streets, winding over to the next arena. Sound check was no drama, and all the cats at the venue were shaking their heads, saying they were embarrassed by the behavior of those fans in Milan. One thing I learned about Italians. They're hot-blooded. Proud as hell. Easy to rile up. But they also respect the fact that you'll stand up for yourself. By the rest of the shows in Italy, the whole story had reversed and all the Italians I met told me, “Look, Ice, we apologize for Milan.“ We loved the rest of our European gigs. Of course“”it goes without saying“”we haven't been back to Milan since!

I'll never forget the moment. I was at home playing a video game called Tecmo-Bowl with four of my boys when Sean E. Sean called me. “Yo! Check the TV! The President is on the news, talking about “˜Cop Killer.' “ We flipped the channel to CNN and it wasn't President Bush, actually. It was Vice President Dan Quayle, talking about me, looking pissed, saying the name “Ice-T“ like he had shit on his tongue, calling my record “obscene.“ As soon as Quayle said, “Ice-T,“ there was a collective groan around my living room. Ah shit. I knew the band and I were in for some drama. But at first, it just seemed stupid to me. Petty and ridiculous. Why were they tripping? First off, it wasn't like “Cop Killer“ was a novel concept. There'd already been a group called Millions of Dead Cops. There'd been a movie out called Cop Killer, a book called Cop Killer, and Black Flag had been doing superaggressive songs like this long before Body Count. I thought I was in a fairly safe zone of self-expression. I thought“”especially within the world of rock and roll“”that I was free to write what I wanted. I was actually listening to one of Seymour Stein's favorite rock bands, the Talking Heads, and had their song “Psycho Killer“ on my mind and one day I just said, “Fuck it, I'll make a song called “˜Cop Killer.' “ I wanted to blend the sound of speed metal with a topic that was real to Body Count's lives. As the controversy continued to build, our jaws stayed dropped. I kept saying, “What the fuck? It's a song. It's an old song. It's a protest record. It's a song about a guy who lost his mind over brutal cops.“ I told a group of reporters: “I'm singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain't never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it. If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.“

Now, looking back on it, this is what I learned: Yes, you have the right to say whatever you want in America, but you have to be prepared for the ramifications of what you say. When I yelled “Cop Killer,“ I did not prepare for the fallout. I'd been dissing rappers for years; they didn't do shit. Then I dissed the cops“”and they came after me like no gang I've ever encountered. Then Charlton Heston, Tipper Gore, and the President of the United States himself came after me.

When this shit happened, when Charlton Heston went into that shareholders meeting, thirty million dollars went into the balance. Charlton Heston, as the head of the National Rifle Association, impacted the Warner Bros. bottom line. He stood there in the meeting reading my lyrics like it was a page from the Planet of the Apes script. I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF I'M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF I'M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF “¦ He didn't even know what he was talking about. “These are the lyrics to “˜Killer Cop,' “ he said. “Oops, I mean “˜Cop Killer.' “ He's so outraged, yet he doesn't even know the name of the record? It was some crazy, hypocritical bullshit.

I got to be in the cliffhanger“”the season's final episode“”and I got to kill Malik Yoba's baby. I was cutting fingers off. I was a beast. Doing some crazy-ass sinister shit“”I had a great time!

“This is an ensemble cast. You don't work all the days. Just come do four shows, Ice.“ “Okay, that sounds cool.“ I agreed to do four shows. I've stayed eleven years.

Here's one real jewel from the game. Pimps and hoes don't fall in love, they make love. I like to use the strip club example because most men won't cop to having been with a hooker, but they will admit they've been to the strip club. When you're in the club, that girl giving you lap dances, looking into your eyes, doesn't love you. She's making love to you. Your dumb ass thinks she loves you and you give her all your money. Sorry. She doesn't give a shit about you, dog. The big bosses at NBC don't love me; they make love to me. They act like they love me because my fucking show is making money. I'm putting millions of dollars into their bank account. I'm a top-shelf ho, but I'm still a ho.

ONE THING I'VE LEARNED from straddling two worlds: Hollywood is way more gangster than the streets. Hollywood is way colder. Way more vicious. When I first started doing TV and movies, I never saw people get fired the way they do in show business. I never saw the coldness of the producers. They just don't care about anybody. I suppose it's because they don't deal with the same ramifications as you do on the streets; they can hide behind attorneys and lawsuits. It's a whole other set of rules. With just a glance or a nod from the boss on the set, a producer will get his ass fired. The next day“”boom“”there's a new producer sitting in his chair. The gangster of it is: I'm not even gonna fire you, dude. You won't even know it's coming. The boss is smiling the whole time, acting like everything's cool. In the street, we call that rocking somebody to sleep. I've learned so much hard-core gangsterism from show business. As a black street gangster, if I don't like you, trust me, you'll know it. That's something the Italian mob had over us: Black people often have a problem disguising our anger. It comes down to this. The higher you go up the mountain, the colder it gets. I've been around some of the most ruthless gangsters in the streets of South Central L.A., but I've never seen anything like Hollywood's gangsterism. In the studios, they're dealing with billions of dollars. On the streets, you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars. When cats are dealing with billions of dollars, anybody“”I mean, anybody“”is expendable.

While I was single in New York, I found myself looking for a woman who would do for me what Sharon Osbourne was doing for my man Ozzy.

People are always asking, “What's the thing that holds you guys together?“ They think that it's love or sex or companionship. I say “admiration.“ Love is a great thing but you also have to admire your mate. When I go on one of her modeling shoots, I watch her working and think, “Yo, Coco is the bomb.“ When I'm rapping or doing my thing as an actor, she says, “That's just Ice“”he can do that shit.“ I don't mean this to sound too corny, but when you admire your partner, when neither one feels subservient to the other, then you actually feel like teammates. It becomes a real-life Bonnie and Clyde, ride-or-die dynamic. It's tough sometimes in the heat of a relationship to remember that y'all are teammates and not opponents; allies not enemies. A successful marriage is built on the realization that the other person helps the overall situation, that they've got your back no matter what.

PEOPLE ALWAYS ASK COCO and me, “How do you keep it hot? How do you keep things exciting in the bedroom?“ It's very simple. I have to find out what turns her on and I've got to be willing to do it. And she has to ask me what I like and be willing to do it.

That's one thing I've learned about parenting. Your kids need to feel it. Not hear it. Feel it. By the end of twelfth grade, he had decent grades, but ended up five credits short on graduation. They wouldn't let him walk. It would've been different if he didn't graduate and nobody said nothing. But because he couldn't graduate with his friends, couldn't walk the stage, he hurt. He really felt what I warned him about. Because every friend and uncle and aunt had marked it on their calendar. He had one hundred people“”literally“”that wanted to come to his graduation. And he had to man-up and tell them he wasn't walking. He had to stay and re-do summer school English. He had his diploma by mid-July, but he was still bummed out that he didn't get to walk the stage in June. And that's a big moment in any teenager's life. I'd warned him for a long time. “Yo, I'm not the one that's going to feel fucked up, homey. You will.“ And he did. I saw it in his eyes. You can do all the parenting in the world, but something like that has to happen to them from time to time, something that knocks the wind out of them. And that graduation shit hit him hard. I know that it sucked way more than me bawling him out or punishing him. “Okay, let him just feel that sadness and disappointment,“ I told Darlene. “Don't say nothin' more.“

But now that I've transformed, Tesha's starting to look for guys that are more like the new me rather than the old me. When she was growing up, I was hustling. That's who I was. I was doing dirt every day. She went after those criminal-minded guys. Now that I'm on TV“”who the fuck knows? Maybe she'll go after an actor.

Honestly, I'm starting my family from scratch. I've got my daughter, Tesha, and my son, Little Ice. I've got my wife, Coco“”our relationship is now ten years strong“”but she's not their mother. That's a complicated family dynamic, I know. But our relationships are probably more close to the average American family than the advertising image of two parents living with their two perfect kids in the 'burbs.

In retrospect, I understand: Dude is a child. As a child you don't really have guidance. Maybe he doesn't know about the ground-breaking artists who laid the foundation for him. Maybe he doesn't know enough to pay homage to those men. Or maybe he isn't capable of making better music. I mean, it's not his intent to destroy hip-hop. Soulja Boy doesn't know me from a can of paint. Good luck with his career. Good luck to everything he's trying to do.

FUNNY STORY about Quentin Tarantino. I loved Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction“”all Quentin's movies, and especially his scripts, are off-the-chain. So I went to Tarantino one day, told him that I wanted some help writing a screenplay. “Quentin,“ I said, “I've got a movie idea and I wanted to get your advice“”“ He cut me off. “Dude,“ he said. “Where do you think I get all my ideas from? From your music! You don't need any help from me writing anything.“

I'm not naà¯ve. When I talk to kids, I know damn well that if I was broke they wouldn't give a fuck what I have to say. But they see the success. They want to know how to be successful. That's the only reason people follow anybody, from preachers to politicians. It's in human nature to chase success. He did it“”how can I do it?

One thing I always stress to kids, one of the key lessons that drove me toward success, is “Don't be afraid to take a loss.“ You're guaranteed to miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take. You've got to be able to fail. As a dude, if every girl you talk to has to like you, you'll never hook up. You've got to work the averages. A girl gives you the brush-off“”so what? Maybe she's having a bad day. Maybe she's got a better-looking boyfriend. Maybe you just look fucking nasty to her. Whatever, man. Nobody wins 100 percent of the time. A lot of people stagnate in life because they're so afraid to lose. They use that fear as a crutch to not even try. Michael Jordan was the best I ever saw playing hoops and didn't hit 100 percent of his jump shots. Babe Ruth had his fair share of strikeouts. You gotta know that's part of the game. I'm in a career now“”acting“”where rejection hits you in the face every goddamn day. Like we say, “Charge that to the game.“ As hustlers, we also used to say: “It ain't about the come up“”it's about the comeback.“ Anybody can come up, but can they come back? That's where you get your stripes. If you take an L, you have to get your shit together, shake it off, and come back. The biggest winners in life are the cats best at absorbing losses. Once you know how to fail, only then you can get in the game.

LIFE ISN'T ABOUT THE MATERIAL THINGS YOU OWN. (THERE'S NO LUGGAGE RACK ON A HEARSE.) IT'S ABOUT THE EXCEPTIONAL EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE.

ALWAYS REFER TO COPS AS “OFFICER“ WHEN SPEAKING TO THEM. THEY HAVE RESPECT ISSUES. GIVE 'EM THAT, AND YOU MIGHT SLIDE PAST 'EM.

A NERD TALKS ABOUT IT. A GEEK CAN ACTUALLY DO IT.

EVERY DAY SOMEONE ASKS ME WHERE I LEARNED HOW TO ACT. ANSWER: STANDING IN FRONT OF A JUDGE IN COURT.