Emil Ferris Quotes

Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody needs their own personal art to heal up their problems.

For a young person, anybody who's sorting out and trying to make a life for himself or herself, to have the opportunity each day to set down - sit down and then set down thoughts, words - it's a crucial, crucial way of staying alive, of not allowing yourself and not allowing the culture outside yourself to totally dominate your life.

Recovery stabilized me; songwriting gave me a purpose.

Certainly, I devote my energy to both telling my personal life story and seeking self- obliteration. However, I will not destroy myself through art.

I started writing to save my life.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

In the beginning, I was searching for myself in my music. My music was for me. I didn't have the mental room to be conscious of the listener; I wrote to save myself.

I think writing is very, very therapeutic.

I just know what I go through, and I know how to speak on it in an interesting way.

I've been writing a lot of songs about my personal life and identity. That can be a real healing process.

You know the way you tell your life story to a friend? I just told mine to a piano.

Writing is very cathartic for me.

I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it's still a work in progress.

I really enjoy the therapeutic value of writing songs.

Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.

I wanted to tell my story in a way I haven't done before, things I've been going through in my life.

Acting can be an amazingly cathartic thing - especially for young girls.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

Therapy is therapy. Writing is for writing.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

When I do my collection, it is in a way my own story.

I'm not gonna do the same, tired, standard 'I was born in a log cabin...' kind of book. There's so much more I want to do.