Stephen Adly Guirgis Quotes

You're going to go through tough times - that's life. But I say, 'Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.' See the positive in negative events.

In the past, I was definitely more apt to storing pain away and not worrying about it. But as I get older, it's really about figuring out how to process it, how to feel it, and then also how to use it in my art.

Most things I go through I have to write about.

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.

The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don't let it get the best of you.

The thing I love about music is that you can take things that are painful, deep things that hurt you, and you can turn them into something beautiful.

Every person gets negative things, they learn from those negative things, and you become a positive person.

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Even out of severe difficulty, some positive things come.

Inside of every problem lies an opportunity.

I've got rid of a lot of cynicism and anger. I feel positive about my development, and I just want to carry on making music and building myself as a person.

Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.

For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.

And I'm a believer that you take a negative and turn it into a positive, and as it turned out, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And so I do appreciate the Ranger staff and the Ranger organization for giving me that opportunity.

I lived in the projects and the ghetto, and turned the negative into a positive.

I want to make lemonade out of the lemons that were dealt to me.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

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

What 'Short Term 12' did was it gave me the confidence to explore my intuition more. The healing process that came for me for making that movie and then sharing it with people - I was able to see, first hand, that movies can have a healing power and they can teach us things.

Questions don't easily die within me until they're answered, and so being able to write a song and put words to complex feelings is part of my process of understanding and letting go of things.

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.

I find it easier to write about stuff that is frustrating.

A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.

I always want to find meaning in stuff that sucks - I don't want it to be the end of the sentence.

As soon as I broke my foot, I remember thinking that I'm going to make this the best thing that's ever happened to me.