F. Gary Gray Quotes

I find the education I got from living in Derby and being streetwise and knowing the people that I know, the lessons that I had to learn growing up, have set me in good stead for this kind of working life.

I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.

As my father would have said, I went through the college of hard knocks.

Well, anything can happen and it happened to me. I learned everybody has a story.

You can learn from everyone, the president or the cleaner. You need teachers in life, but they're not always school teachers or professors. You learn from ordinary people. You learn from travel, from just walking down the street.

You gotta live life before you can talk about it. Sometimes when things don't work out in life, they work out on stage.

I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Lived it and I'm still here to talk about it and help someone else if I can.

Certain stories we carry with us, events in our life, they define who we are. It's not a matter of getting over anything; we have to make the best of it.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

I'm a romantic, but I'm not a romantic in the traditional sense. I like to romanticize what happens to me. Whatever happens to me - you could quantify it as good or bad - I romanticize it. I think along the lines of 'When that thing happened, it made me who I am.' That kind of thing. It's a different way of being romantic.

I've experienced great things, I've experienced great tragedies. I've done almost everything I could possibly ever imagine doing, but I just know that there's more.

There is nothing I've been through in my life that I regret, or that I would go back and change. I feel like everything that happened - personally and professionally - I went through for a reason, and I learned from those things.

Everything that happens to me in my life, be it good or bad, it's all education, and it's important for that to become part of what you do. It all feeds the beast.

Oh my gosh, I'd give so much advice to a younger version of myself. I would say it really does get better as you get older. The things that mean so much, the things that seem like, you know, it's going to cause the end of the world, are all things that I've already forgotten.

I didn't lead a very wise life, myself, but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come of age very quickly through shipwreck and disaster.

Everything I have experienced in my life helps form who I am today, and I would not change or forget any of it.

I think growing up in New York, you see so much at such a young age, there's no bubble to escape into.

I came from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, so you do learn how to survive in that environment.

It has been an interesting road, but I wouldn't trade any of it for the world, because I feel like all of those instances in my life I felt molded me and strengthened me and made me who I am.

My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.

I've had some tremendous adventures, good and bad. It's part of the novel, and a novel isn't interesting if it doesn't have some good and bad. And you don't know what good is if bad hasn't been a part of your life.

Most of my life wasn't about knowledge from books, but experiential knowledge.

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life.

Brooklyn is not the easiest place to grow up in, although I wouldn't change that experience for anything.

Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid.