Quotes from Tyler Perry

When people you love pass on, and they know without a shadow of a doubt that you loved them, there's not a trace of regret. You're both set free.

When I was twenty years old and putting on my first play in Birmingham, Alabama, I had to use my mother's credit card to rent a van to get there. The bill was around three hundred dollars. But the show didn't make any money, and when I came home I had to tell her I couldn't pay for the rental.

When people have never felt the power of their own wings, they can't imagine taking flight.

You might find, as I did, that the people you love the most

are the ones most capable of infecting your dreams with doubt and negativity.

to my faith, worked toward my dream, and then surrendered.

So my thing is, whatever you don't like, change it, but change it from the inside first.

You got to go get that stuff for yourself. You got to wake up every day and say, "I'm good enough, I deserve to be happy, I deserve to have all this good stuff coming my way." You can't depend on that to come from nobody else.

Hell, sit back and work on yourself. How are you going to offer something to somebody else if you ain't been to visit you yet?

Everybody is dealt a different hand, but you have to do what you have with your hand.

What I know about the Bible is this: Those whom God helped to ascend to a higher place were all flawed individuals, except for

You know, people don't want their intelligence insulted. They don't want to be preached to. They don't want to be degraded. All they want to do is sit, laugh, have a good time, love one another, forget about what's going on in the world, and find something out so they can be useful in this life. Do this and you have common sense.

Jesus. They had made mistakes. Some had done terrible things and yet were still able to find their way to higher.

MY CHILDHOOD WAS A STORY of discouragement, belittlement, and unthinkable abuse, and yet I rose above. There was no way I could have found any kind of happiness, hope, or vision if my mother, Maxine, and my aunt Mae hadn't shown

me the grace of God. They, as well as other powerful souls, were my spiritual role models. They didn't have great mansions or millions of dollars to leave me when they passed, but they planted the seeds of grace, the invaluable gift of knowing God.

Nurture your imagination with hard work, positive energy, ease, and self-encouragement. Cherish your dreams and keep them safe. When others try to tear you down, raise yourself up by knowing God is in your secret fort; he's in your house.

say "adopted" because my father, Emmitt, was abandoned and discovered in a drainage canal at the age of two. He was taken to Mae so that she could raise him.

Ordinarily, that would have meant living in anxiety and fear, but my father was a different kind of man when he was around Mae. Instead of boiling up in anger and violence, he was a placid lake. He would even brag about what

Mamma's words settle deep in my heart: God's got it in its banks. He's in control.

He'd stomp through the house in his heavy work boots, yelling about everything we were doing wrong. If anything got in his path, he would explode and his fists would fly. Almost in a supernatural way, his anger would turn his brown eyes into an electric green, and when that happened I knew the worst was still to come. This was our hell on earth, and Mamma and I were burning in its flames.

That world opened up to me on my first visit to Atlanta during "Freaknik," a sort of spring break without the beach for black college kids. I wasn't in college, but I went anyway. While all the kids were getting numbed out, drinking and partying, I was waking up to possibility. For the first time in my life, I saw there were black people doing great things with their lives. There were black doctors, lawyers, business owners, and well-off families

But I couldn't get the preacher's words out of my head: "If you pray, God will see you through it. He'll answer your prayers.

get through the spring, summer, and autumn living paycheck to paycheck, but during the chilly months of winter, the money ran out and I couldn't pay my rent. The unthinkable happened. I became homeless. I'd sleep in my car and try to keep warm by running the heater or wrapping myself in a quilt Aunt Mae had given me. If I had some cash, I'd crash in a pay-by-the-week hotel room.

Sometimes in life, son, when you pray and you've said and done all you can,