Reggie Watts Quotes

Every once in a while, I'll have an acting role that allows me to look at something in my life and work it out.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.

You can actually take your pain and processes it into some kind of form of art. So I mean, I've easily always been able to do that, but also I've always been able to give myself perspective - or, you know, older people always give you perspective.

If it's physical pain, you just deal with it the best way you can. But if it's more emotional, I don't know. I just try my best to feel it, take it in, and just allow myself to go through whatever may actually come from it. And then a certain amount of it, you can use to transform it through art, which is the healthy way of dealing with it, as well.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.

I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.

Pain is inevitable. It is actually a great opportunity for growth, but when we blame or fail to take responsibility for our suffering, the pain becomes stagnant, and stagnant pain can have a compounding effect if left unchecked.

I do my best to allow myself to really feel it [emotional pain]. Cry. Get all in it. Really experience my experience so that I may move through it. And talk about it. I try not to let anything get brushed over and swept under the rug.

I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

I had a lot of songs and words and scenes stuck inside of me. So Jacknife encouraged me to bring them all out. So, in essence, 'You and Others' is my diary.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

One way to make a positive out of a negative is that you can put it into your work.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

Songwriting helps me sort out my personal problems. With acting, you're just a tool for someone's ideas.

Like everybody, I've had a lot of pain in my life and I'm a work in progress. You must have a true desire to see the world from a different point of view, and that comes with growing up.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

Sometimes I felt as a writer I was purging, and it almost hurt to purge to that level. Now it doesn't feel that way, maybe because I'm older. Maybe life has given me some punches, but it didn't knock me down.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

One of the nice things about writing is you can take essentially painful things in your life and turn them into something that might be useful, or at least entertaining, to somebody else.