Jill Scott Quotes

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

There have been times in my life when I felt compelled to write things down as a matter of therapy, but whatever I kept about those days, I shredded. It was too personal.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

I've been writing books because it's been my way of dealing with the demons. The act of sitting down and writing the books down has started healing process that's been long overdue.

Experiencing sadness and anger can make you feel more creative, and by being creative, you can get beyond your pain or negativity.

I don't see it as a form of healing, because if you have wounds that are bleeding I don't think acting will ever get them to stop. But I find acting is a form of illumination.

I really enjoy the therapeutic value of writing songs.

Acting is always therapeutic.

You know, once you have been through a certain amount of things in life, you definitely grow more comfortable with yourself.

I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

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.

I really don't feel that writing is therapy.

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

Writing is my therapy. My feelings build up inside of me and then I sit down and write a song.

I guess I usually write when I'm in a really intense headspace, because it's my form of self-therapy.

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.

It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

Keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you.

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.

The only thing I have done religiously in my life is keep a journal. I have hundreds of them, filled with feathers, flowers, photographs, and words - without locks, open on my shelves.

I just feel very lucky to be able to write fiction because I think, otherwise, I would have had to spend a fortune on a psychiatrist - and I still wouldn't get 1/100th of what I get writing fiction.

I'm open. All of my situations have made me who I am.