Dustin Hoffman Quotes

If I hadn't had acting, I would probably have imploded.

I was caught in a private cycle of sadness and the only conceivable relief I could find was in the telling.

Acting's not therapy, but it can be therapeutic.

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

Acting can be an amazingly cathartic thing - especially for young girls.

I can't say that I fully relate to things that I play. Sometimes it's nice to spend half the day crying; then you don't have to do it in real life.

Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music.

If I didn't have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

Performing is my therapy, to become different people onstage.

I was going mad. One day, I just started writing, and it was like therapy because I was in a position where I couldn't rage. I never expected to be a writer; it's a different world than I ever expected to be in.

When I first started making music, it was where I went when I couldn't express myself, when I wasn't able to connect with other people, when I couldn't talk about what I was going through.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

I think there are probably a lot of actors like me who I think probably struggle to feel comfortable in their own lives, and acting in some ways provides a safe context for them to live out emotions that they possibly repress or live out experiences that they are not afforded by virtue of circumstance.

I love to cry. It's great.

I have been blessed with roles that allow me to express something very personal at a specific time in my life. I seek them out; acting is my therapy.

We all have an escape. Mine was theater.

I love pouring my heart out. People don't want to hear you whine when you're with friends, so you can sing about it instead - it's the best outlet.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess.

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

I've always been in the theater. I've always gone to it. That's been my way to cope. Early on in my career, I remember running - fleeing - to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.

Like I can't cry for myself so I will let this song take all of the things inside I can't let anyone else see and offer it up, as if the sound were some kind of god, and my pain is some kind of sacrifice.

I turned to music originally because of my past and needing a release or an outlet to get out anger or frustration or hurt.

Acting has always been a way for me to express the emotions I had buried. If I hadn't acted, I would have gone insane. In my acting class, I could let out my real tears and everyone thought it was the character. But no, it was me.