Roger Ross Williams Quotes

I like to act because I can forget about everything else.

A-Frame was a real, pivotal moment because that's where I really got to channel a lot of emotions.

When I was young, there was never any space for me to get attention of my own that wasn't negative. Art, and the practice of making art, was the only space that was mine alone, where I could be anyone and do anything, where just by using my head and my hands I could cry, or laugh, or get pissed off.

An individual poor person is an isolated island by himself and herself. IT can end that isolation overnight.

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

What singing means to me, I never did consider myself a singer, I just let people watch me feel music and how it comes through me. I've worked on it and practiced a lot. I mean, music, I dance to it, and singing is just one way of getting it out of me.

The whole point of creating music for me is to give voice to things that aren't normally given voice to.

The need to express one's self in writing springs from a maladjustment of life, or from an inner conflict which the adolescent (or the grown man) cannot resolve in action.

I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.

Music gives voices to people struggling to come out of themselves.

I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.

Every time I felt the pain coming on I'd go downstairs and hammer out an idea. After a few months I started to take a look at what I was making, I had for the first time in my life written a large grip of songs completely alone and without any expectations or plans of what they would be for.

I like the fact that I can go away and lose myself so I don't have to live in the world of courage that everyone else does. I like creating, it's what I do, and acting allows me to stretch all those different muscles in all kinds of ways. That's pretty cool.

As for the healing, that comes from the writing, from living and writing. That's my catharsis. That's why I never regret sharing because it's part of my healing!

I see myself as someone who's been saved by writing. God knows what I would have been, become or how I would have ended up without it.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

I believe everybody should have a room where they get rid of all their releases. So my room was a stage.

I have never expected anything from my work but the satisfaction I could get from it by the very fact of painting and saying what I couldn't say otherwise.

I'm only myself when I have a guitar in my hands.

Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp.

Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.

I could be going through something in my life that I might not want to talk about in my music because my music is the way that I escape some of those things.

I've always expressed myself best through writing. I've gotten out all of my deepest feelings that way for as long as I can remember.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.