John Edgar Wideman Quotes

I have been able to tap into all the negative things that can happen to me throughout my life by numbing myself to the pain so to speak and kind of being able to vent it through my music.

I was always one who thought that if something is painful, you just ignore it and it will go away. That's not true.

I try to go through it [emotional pain]; understanding is going to take me to a better place. And I do hot yoga.

My routines come out of total unhappiness. My audiences are my group therapy.

I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.

Sure, I've had some bad times, but everybody does. But people don't get to talk about them like I do, unless they do to a therapist. People don't get to put them in the paper like I do.

Therapy? I don't need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.

If there's ever been a dark moment in my life... well, I wanted to check out. Music was a big escape.

Just because I'm talking about something that might have been a sad or painful situation doesn't mean that I'm sad or tortured 24 hours a day any more than anybody else is.

I'm mindful not to get too self-pitying or too revealing of my own pain.

When life gave me tough situations, acting helped me cope with those situations.

People always say time heals. Time doesn't necessarily heal anything. It allows you to manage things. There are occasions where you feel the pain as if it just happened, but you know that it's a fleeting moment.

I've been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.

It can feel like your whole world is caving in on you, and if you don't speak about it, it gets worse. You have to talk about your problems.

There's an incredible amount of pain involved in being a human, but this humorous stuff is essential in overcoming it.

It's been my experience with damaged people: they don't wake up every day and wallow in the bad things that have happened to them.

I've used my sense of humor as a coping tool. It's gotten me through a lot of challenging times.

When we have emotional pain in our lives, we are going to seek to relieve that pain in some way.

Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.

The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery.

I try to get through emotional pain and not go around it, it always ends sooner that way. I also use chocolate.

Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.

My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life... I had to live in my head... art was a way of making myself feel better.

I'm a creative person who had a lot of dark time in my life. I can still get to it: I can still go to a relationship or a time when things weren't great. But it's getting further and further from me.