Top 25 Tony Hawk Quotes

You might not make it to the top, but if you are doing what you love, there is much more happiness there than being rich or famous.

I feel like skateboarding is as much of a sport as a lifestyle, and an art form, so there’s so much that that transcends in terms of music, fashion, and entertainment.

Honestly, the best skater that I’ve seen who raps is Tyler, The Creator. He really can skate… He’s legit.

There are endorsements I regret taking when I was younger and didn’t know any better. But I didn’t have options then. People weren’t knocking on my door.

Skating was popular, but it wasn’t mainstream. It had this underground following, and you could go on tours, win decent prize money, and make royalties from signature products – that’s how I came to buy a house when I was a senior in high school.

When you break your pelvis, you can’t do a whole lot. It took me about six weeks to be able to get out of bed. Anything you do that shakes your body is painful all over, so you can’t cough, you can’t sneeze, and going to the bathroom is impossible.

When you’ve got videos up on Web sites that are literally shot the same day, the whole skate community knows right away when new tricks are invented or new techniques are available.

In ramp skating, there’s this guy Alex Perelson who’s really coming into his own and doing some amazing new stuff we haven‘t seen before. Just different types of spin.

I changed high schools three times because my parents moved. I had one friend my freshman year named Miki Vukovich. Miki and I were the only skaters in our high school. He runs my foundation now.

When I landed the first 900 at the XGames, it was just – it was a personal achievement. It was something that I have strived for for years and years and years, and in a lot of ways had given up on it. But I just didn’t think of the resonance that would have.

I love snowboarding, but I would never want to do it competitively or at a professional level. Snowboarding is a spawn of skating, and skating is my passion.

I believe that people should take pride in what they do, even if it is scorned or misunderstood by the public at large.

I was nerdy and really into computers. I was a good student until my senior year, when I started traveling and had a lot of absences.

Technology has allowed me to reach my fans directly. Social media: it has been a complete revolution of how to interact, promote and share things.

I wanted to promote skateboarding as much as possible through different media.

I was a lot more cultured than the other kids in my high school. Because I traveled, I understood different cultures and had a more worldly view. Most of the people I went to high school with had never been outside of California.

You just have to adapt, and you have to realize where people are going to actually play their games. It used to just be Nintendo and PlayStation, and now it’s all kind of devices. So you’ve got to learn to adapt what you know from the technology into those areas… I’ve been wanting to do a mobile game for a long time.

I was skating with friends in my neighborhood, and then eventually I was invited to go to the skate park with one of them. When I saw people flying all around – literally flying in and out of bowls – that is when I knew I wanted to do it. I wanted to figure out how I could get there and how I could fly.

When I was around eleven or twelve, my board got hung up on the top of a bowl, and I got a concussion, and I knocked my teeth out. That was the first time that I got seriously injured, and I was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and my parents briefly doubted.

When people start talking about venture capital and finances and how to create this and do that, a lot of it, I swear, it’s like sitting in an escrow meeting when all you want to do is buy a house, and you’re signing 50 pieces of paper, but you have no idea what they’re talking about.

The biggest lesson I learned from my dad is to support children even if they’re doing something that is unorthodox.

I started skating when I was about 10 years old. It was in an alleyway. I picked up my brother‘s skateboard and stood on it. I started to roll down the alley, and I yelled at my brother asking him how I turn the thing. At the end of the alley, I just jumped off, picked up the board and physically turned it around.

There’s a stigma to skating. People think of it as a kid‘s sport. People kept telling me I couldn’t possibly make a living out of it. Then they said I couldn’t keep it up in my 30s. And here I am in my 40s, and I’m still improving my skills.

The pro skaters I know are responsible members of society. Many of them are fathers, homeowners, world travelers and successful entrepreneurs. Their hairdos and tattoos are simply part of our culture, even when they raise eyebrows during PTA meetings.

When I started skating, it was such a small community. You didn’t aspire to be rich or famous or make a career out of it because that wasn’t something anyone had done yet.