J. B. Smoove Quotes

I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story.

After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

As I've gotten older and my life is a lot more stable, I've gotten more into storytelling.

When I made my first film, it was just an adventure. But after my first movie, I guess I got more of a feeling of what was happening around me.

This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in stories. Because everyone has a story in their life, and when their story doesn't make sense, that's when we get depressed, I think.

Your life should be a story you are excited to tell.

When you're operating on uninvestigated theories of what's going on and you aren't even aware of it, you're in what I call "the dream." Often the dream becomes troubling; sometimes it even turns into a nightmare. At times like these, you may want to test the truth of your theories by doing The Work on them. The Work always leaves you with less of your uncomfortable story. Who would you be without it? How much of your world is made up of unexamined stories? You'll never know until you inquire.

I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

I really believe that we all have the ability to come out of our story. But you have to tell your story first in order to come out of it.

Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we're telling ourselves and question their validity?

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

When we deny our stories, They define us. When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.

Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

The most wonderful thing in the world is somebody who knows who they are and knows where they're going and knows what they were created to do

You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.

Having a mental snapshot of where you are, where you are going, and what you are moving toward is incredibly powerful.

True beauty is knowing who you are and believing in yourself. Happy people know their purpose, have courage to fight for it and strength to keep going.