Reframing Quotes

Change your thoughts and you change your world.

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

In looking for humor, keep in mind this guideline: Sometimes it takes a little time to see the humor in your upsets; you may not find something to laugh about immediately.

Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

When things are a disappointment, try not to be so discouraged.

The idea of songwriting is a transformative thing, and what I do with songwriting is take situations that are quite ordinary and transform them in some way. Apart from things like the murder ballads, the songs I write, at their core, are quite ordinary human concerns, but the process of writing about them transforms them into something else.

I always substitute the word 'feedback' for 'failure.'

To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills.

I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

A lot of people deal with things that are bad. Once you've been through something, you grow from it and you take a lot in. You can always turn it into something positive.

Getting beaten is sometimes a good thing. If you're a positive person, you can turn it around and make it into a good thing.

Ryan is my bridge to the past, to memories that lose some of their sting when he recounts them.

Humor expands our limited picture frame and gets us to see more than just our problem.

When I run into disappointment - say, for example, not getting a role I'd hoped for - I just try not to take it personally.

I think that's the greatest gift one can have: point of view. You know? I've come to believe that if you have a bad memory of something, change it.

Sometimes I will make CliffsNotes of my CliffsNotes.

Can you actually go through life without labeling what happens to you as good or bad? Sure you can. You have to train yourself to do this. You have been conditioned to think of things as bad or good. You can de-condition yourself. It is neither easy nor fast but it is possible.

You can either feel sorry for yourself and lay down and cry, or you can actually learn from it and move on and find all the positives in it.

There are no failures in life: only learning opportunities.

Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.

There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

Nothing is miserable unless you think it is so.