Judd Apatow Quotes

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 think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

The compensation of growing old ... was simply this; that the passion remains as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

I think when I stop fighting, I die in a sense.

Maybe that's what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of its depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over or around it, whichever you chose in the end.

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don't know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk--or why. It sounds like a twelve-step mantra and I'm not in Anything Anonymous, though to read some of the crap they write about me, you'd think I should be. I have the kind of life a lot of people would probably sell a kidney to just experience a bit of. But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.

My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about -- acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply. Out of sight and, whenever possible, out of mind.

I think the emotional toolbox I have is healthy for an actor, as far as the intensity of emotions go. It's other things I have to hone. I can swim in that comfortably.

A man has more character in his face at forty than at twenty - he has suffered longer.

We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of it, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

When you're in pain, you're genuinely very, very alive, and that's beautiful. Especially emotional pain.

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.

One learns better than to hand one's choices to fear. With age, with every wound and scar, one learns.

My contention is that as long as you have other faculties-the emotional, psychological, intuitive faculties-you haven't lost yourself or even diminished yourself. Don't be ashamed when you're physically limited or dysfunctional; don't think that you're any less because of your condition. In fact, I feel I am even more myself than I was before I got this illness because I have been able to transcend many of the psychological and emotional limitations I had before I developed ALS.

There's so much shame involved in not being like everyone else. But I learned that the things that made me unique were good. Dealing with problems can be awful. But in the end I got positive results. I don't think I would have been a writer if I didn't have anxiety.

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

You’ll meet her. She’s very pretty, even though sometimes she’s sad for many days at a time. You’ll see, when she smiles, you’ll love her.

[Her] love and tenderness ... gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play-write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

Please don't use the word tough. People might get the impression that I don't care. And I do care, very deeply. Resilient, I think.

In order to access a warrior's courage, we must explore why we are so committed to our story and what we are afraid will happen if we give it up.

I am not a courageous person by nature. I have simply discovered that, at certain key moments in this life, you must find courage in yourself, in order to move forward and live. It is like a muscle and it must be exercised, first a little, and then more and more. All the really exciting things possible during the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap.