Saul Williams Quotes

I hit 'record' whenever I'm going through a really hard time. I don't listen to it for a couple of days, so I have some perspective. If it's too personal to share, and I feel like would alienate the listeners, then I usually don't share that stuff.

I feel like my music at least allows me to release the other side of me, a more vulnerable and sensitive side.

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

It's occurred to me I need to laugh at myself more, and that I don't need to be some sad folk singer all the time. I don't want to be the queen of pain.

What we try to do in TSAW, which is Tasha Smith Actors Workshop, is to help the actor get to the core of who they really are and how they really feel. So, we may have them do a dump, where you just basically express everything that you feel that you have not been able to express, whether it's good, bad, or ugly.

I'm not a super emotional person, so that's one reason I love acting - it makes me deal with myself in that kind of way.

Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.

The only reason I would write a break-up song is because my own problem of allowing myself to relate to people.

My YouTube channel is kind of a library of all my issues I've lived with. To process it emotionally, it's been good and bad.

That's where it begins and ends for me and these songs were the ones that touched me the deepest. It was like I was laying hold of some part of me that I didn't even know was there until I let it out.

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

It's not that I want to necessarily avoid my darker moments, but I don't capitalize them and put a crown on them and tote them around as the answer anymore.

I began to use my sensitivity. And I realized I wasn't weird because I cried a lot.

Writing is a type of therapy for me. I'm always trying to break down what happened, and why I felt a certain way.

Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.

Every role that one does - at least, that's what happens in my case - becomes a sort of therapy.

It's very special that I can go through things - and write them down and record them - and so many people can relate. Not everybody can get out who they are and really feel better after they write.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

I am stronger than words and I am bigger than the box I'm in, and then I see her in the crowd and I fall apart -I am listening and I am listening because what I'm playing isn't something I'm thinking about, it's something I'm feeling all over.

Whatever the emotion is, I have learned over the years to give it space, which is also why I love acting.

It used to make me unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn't know what to do with it. But now I've learned how to make feeling work for me... I don't know, I just want to feel as much as I can, it's what 'soul' is all about.

What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

We cannot heal what we cannot feel.

For me, being able to be vulnerable is difficult, but it's just something that I feel comfortable doing. I need to fully understand why, the thought-process behind the character and I have to believe it. That comes from a lot of preparation.

I'm a very open person. I like to talk a lot about what I'm going through. It's how I cope with things.