169 Quotes by Tyler Perry With Free Shareable Pictures

Happiness for me is totally just being at peace knowing that, everything I'm doing, God is pleased with that. It's complete peace for me.

He who has the gold makes the rules.

The key to life when it gets tough is to keep moving. Just keep moving.

Don't believe the hype. I don't care how many number ones you have at the box office, I don't care how much they say you're great, don't believe it. Just stay in your lane and do what you're supposed to do.

My father who was there in the house, he wasn't at all a role model. And my mother, who was trying to protect me from him as best she could, she took me everywhere with her, which gave me a tremendous amount of sensitivity to the things women go through.

As I experience life and go through things, that's what I write about.

I've been doing television with TBS for quite some time, and it's been a great journey.

I've always wanted to work with Blair, and finally the timing was right. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. I think he's a hugely underrated actor in Hollywood.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

I didn't have a catharsis for my childhood pain, most of us don't, and until I learned how to forgive those people and let it go, I was unhappy.

Children love their mothers. Especially with a boy child and his mother, there's a bond that's unbreakable.

I love to see a woman in high-heeled shoes. There's something about the curve of the feet up the leg to the butt that's really, really wonderful, and the right pair of shoes can give you the right silhouette.

When black women are down with you and in your corner, you have an ally that will move Heaven and Earth.

You close the door on me and tell me I can't, I'm gonna find a way to get in.

Hollywood is finally waking up to the fact that people who go to church also go to the movies. I'm not sure what took them so long to see that or how long they'll keep it up.

What I've learned is you treat women right.

Everyone can relate to love, hurt, pain, learning how to forgive, needing to get over, needing the power of God in their life.

I've never chased money. It's always been about what I can do to motivate and inspire people.

My mother was truly my saving grace, because she would take me to church with her. I would see my mother smiling in the choir, and I wanted to know this God that made her so happy. If I had not had that faith in my life, I don't know where I would be right now.

The most important thing that I learned in growing up is that forgiveness is something that, when you do it, you free yourself to move on.

My biggest success is getting over the things that have tried to destroy and take me out of this life. Those are my biggest successes. It has nothing to do with work.

I definitely do not like Halloween. I don't like masks, creepy clowns, dark things, goblins or witches. They're not just my thing.

It's not an easy journey, to get to a place where you forgive people. But it is such a powerful place, because it frees you.

You can never be upset with the people who forced you into your dream or up higher.

I don't think the dreams die -- I think that people give up. I think it gets too hard.

Statistics say that I'm supposed to be in jail. And I'm not supposed to be alive.

I love to give. I've been a giver all my life.

There are a lot of people who have dreams, goals, and hopes, but there aren't a lot who get to see them realized.

There's a huge demand for my entertainment, and I can't meet the need. So I decided to try a TV show to reach as many of my fans as possible.

I work three months really hard, nonstop, and then I take a month off. Then I do it all over again. I work hard but I give myself four breaks a year.

I know my audience, and they're not people that the studios know anything about.

What do you spend $200 million on, with a film? I can't wrap my brain around that one.

It takes a week to do a sitcom in Hollywood. I do a show a day in my studio, three or four shows a week.

Tyler Perry's brand is faith, family and this whole thing that I've built, while my company, 34th Street Films, is like Disney's Touchstone. We can do anything. People don't know what to expect from me yet.

If you don't want my God here, you don't want me here either. God has been too good to me to go and try to sell out to get some money.

I'm not sure why no one wants to admit there's a viable audience out there that believes in God and wants to see a movie with their family. The demand is there. The supply is not.

I know that there are a lot of people out there with stories far worse than mine but you, too, can make it. To those of you who have, welcome to life. I celebrate you.

I think that with everything I've done, in the end, whoever the central character is, they would find a way to forgive, because that's really important to me.

Forgiveness is important in families, especially when there are so many secrets that need to be healed -- for the most part, every family's got them.

I'm not afraid to have a character say, 'I am a Christian,' or, 'I believe in God,' because I think they represent real people on this Earth.

I think it's important to show a husband and a wife together, in a room, raising children, because you don't see that anymore.

I get a lot of flack from critics that my comedies are all over the place, my dramas are all over the place, they're schizophrenic -- as if I don't know that!

My first show was called 'I Know I've Been Changed' in '92. I tried to do this show for years and years. It kept failing over and over and over again. Every time I went out to do the show, nobody showed up. I was like, 'What is this about?'

I didn't want to be the kind of man that my father was. So I've tried, my entire life, to be the complete and utter opposite of that. And it has served not only the art well, but I think the audience well.

What I know about me is that, in order to lead, you also have to know how to follow.

I think every one of us, in life, have some sort of moment that has happened that we wish we could have done differently or that we wish could have had a different outcome.

You don't try to do anything that Morgan Freeman does. He was the voice of God in a movie. That's Morgan Freeman!

The Bible says that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called according to his purpose. I believe that. Because I've seen it all work.

We are all allowed to support whoever we'd like to in this country. That's the greatest part about being an American -- one of them, that is; you know what I mean?

My life has always been -- there's never been a middle. Either I had or I didn't. Either I was up or I was down.

You know, people at Wal-Mart are standing there with their uniforms on. I feel like I'm putting on a uniform to do a movie. I don't feel like it's dressing in drag.

'Madea' is a Southern term. It's short for 'mother dear.' So there are a lot of Madeas out there.

Oprah is very, very, very special to me. She's an amazing woman.

I feel like I died as a child.

My mother wasn't strong like my aunt. She was just very passive.

I think there's something that happens at 40 where you settle into your own skin and you stop caring what people think -- you realize life is a gift from God and you want to live it to the fullest.

It's a dream realized to partner with Oprah and bring scripted programming to OWN. She has accomplished so much with the network, and I'm excited to work with her to be a part of its continued growth.

Ever since I've been blessed with success, I've struggled a little with anonymity and even family. I've had people calling asking for money, and I have to ask them first, 'Are you working? Have you been trying to help yourself?' Then I feel like I can help.

I'm not an artist. I set the camera up and tell my story.

I want a lot of people to see my movies. More black people. More white people. I want to make that connection.

I look at the stories that Spike Lee tells... Great stories. Great director, great storyteller.

I don't know about marriage as much as I do know that I'd be a great father.

I want to own a network. I want to own a network where you can turn it on with your family all day long and get positive reinforcement.

I don't do divas. I don't do entourages. I don't do the Hollywood crap.

After Obama became president, I realized that black people could not have put him in the White House -- it had to be a collective effort of everybody in the country.

All my life I've tried to hide my height. I was taller than everybody else and stood out, so I would slouch and try to hide it.

The thing about using other people's money is they're going to set the rules.

I thank God I didn't become successful until I was older.

People see truth in my films. That's what they react to, and that's what they relate to.

I remember being a kid and praying in the hell of my house to have somebody love me and somebody that I could love.

I knew that love was around. I truly believe my mother loved me. But feeling it all the time? I didn't.

Did you know you can't say 'Jesus' in a sitcom? They told me that, and I was like, You gotta be kiddin' me. If you don't want my God here, you don't want me here either.

My family never went to a restaurant together; we never went to the movies together. Vacation, we never did that.

If you look at everything I do -- even in 'Boo!' there's a message, and it's always 'faith, family, forgiveness.' That's the greatest gift that I've been given. I can get a message to the very people I grew up with, the millions who love what I do.

I have a fear of tubes and tunnels. Going through any tunnel causes me great anxiety.

I am an architect at heart. I designed every home I've ever had, plus my studio.

I've been trying to learn to ski for years, but there's something about being 6-foot-5 and falling that's not appealing.

Seven years after my mother's passing, I still reach for the phone for a split second to call her. We spoke every day.

Very early on, when I started doing these plays and live shows, I would travel from city to city, and there were a million shows out there... so I wanted to step out among it, and I started putting my name above the title.

I don't have a writer's room. I write all the shows myself. Ninety-one episodes a season, I'm sitting there at the computer writing and writing and writing because I want the voice to be authentic so that the audience is hearing from me and not other writers.

Having my son has changed so much of what I dream about. It used to be about business, business, what's the next deal? What's the next movie? Now it's about him.

I'm not a social media person; I don't know what's going on unless somebody tells me.

For me, there is a guiding compass that just lives inside of me. Every time I've gone against it, something bad has happened. As long as I stay in line and honor it, it has really been life changing.

If you look at 'The Have and the Have Nots,' I didn't want to write a show where everyone is great and wonderful and perfect. I wanted to write it so that you're not really sure who the haves are. You look at Hanna, and you see that she doesn't have much, but she has great faith.

I'm not interested in doing 'Star Wars.' It's an amazing movie, but that's not my gift. I tell the stories that I tell that relate to the people who love what I do. That is the place and the path that I know I am supposed to be on. The minute I try and go do something else, it will be amazing to watch how quickly that don't work.

I try to write from a point of view with my faith being always present and always there. don't want to write characters where everyone is saved. So this Madea character for me is not saved.

The heart of who I am as a person and as a man is forgiveness, after forgiving my father for a lot of things that were done when I was child.

The idea of Christ's love for us all is inspiring to me.

What I've been able to do with my character, Madea, and the other characters, with the jokes, is use it as an anesthetic to get to the heart and soul of real issues. And what I've found on stage over the years is that, while making people laugh, I can drop in pearls of wisdom.

I've always believed in God, from the time I was very, very young. I always knew there was something with me, not necessarily knowing what to call it.

If you haven't forgiven someone, it does not hurt that person. They're sleeping at night. You're holding onto that, and all the damage is being done to you internally.

I haven't read a book in a very, very long time because, when I'm writing, I don't like to see other people's work. I don't want to see something great and not be able to use it, and I don't want to have any subconscious influences.

I've been on 'Oprah' a dozen times, and cried once.

I had one request when I started doing the plays. My prayer was, 'God, let me do well enough to be able to take care of my mother.' I was able to do that 'til the day she died because of my audience.

Being on the 'Alex Cross' set, and watching and learning about and paying attention to everything that was going on there, I realized, 'Here is a moment for me to learn.'

Norman Lear is my all-time, ultimate hero. He's an amazing man. That's one person I'm looking forward to meeting. What he did, with shows and sitcoms, he's my hero.

I'm trying to conquer swimming. I'm getting there. I've gotta conquer it. I had a fear of drowning and tunnels and flying. I started flying and got my pilot's license, so I conquered that. Now, I'm onto swimming and tunnels.

In order to have the success with 'Empire,' you have to have Fox; you have to have huge PandA. You have to have huge budgets for the show. I'm pretty confident that the budget of 'Empire' is six times what I'm spending on 'Have And Have Nots.'

I don't want to leave this planet until I achieve everything that I was put here to do.

Madea is a cross between my mother and my aunt. She's the type of grandmother that was on every corner when I was growing up.

There's this great thing called the 'Chitlin' Circuit,' which I started my shows on and back in the day when, you know, Ray Charles and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, they couldn't get into white establishments, so they went on this circuit and toured. They were huge stars in their own community, you know, and that's pretty much my same story.

I love a good breakfast -- grits and eggs, French toast, turkey bacon. My grandmother on my father's side used to make tea cakes, and her breakfasts were unbelievable. There was fresh ham, and she would go out to the yard to get fresh eggs. She lived in rural Louisiana, and we'd spend summers with her.

Macaroni and cheese was my mother's special dish. She'd also make jambalaya and dirty rice and bake a ham that would be incredible. And greens. But if you were looking for vegetables and healthy things, there weren't a lot of those.

It's most important that you surround yourself with positivity always, and have it in your mind at all times.

You can get a thousand no's from people, and only one "yes" from God.

It doesn't matter if a million people tell you what you can't do, or if ten million tell you no. If you get one yes from God that's all you need.

I thank God for Closed Doors.

Don't wait for someone to green light your project, build your own intersection.

When you put on your shortest dress, please leave some mystery in it. That's the difference between a miniskirt and a ho-skirt. A ho-skirt shows your Frisbee. A miniskirt shows just enough to cause some mystery. What these young women lack is mystery.

A miniskirt shows just enough to cause some mystery. What these young women lack is mystery so the old women have to have it.

I'm a child who was abused. I know the difference. I clearly know the difference. The whipping for correction and then their child abuse.

If you are in business trying to make it, things are falling apart and you can't get it together and you don't know what is going on and you wanna stop. Don't stop. The only way you can make it and have true success in your life. And there's one way. You can't have any fear.

I put a thong on a few months ago trying to be sexy. I've been looking for it but ain't seen it since.

When I was a kid, I had asthma, so I would have to take cod liver oil all the time. So anything fishy that reminds me of that taste, I can't eat. I love Chilean sea bass because I don't taste it there. But salmon? No, no, no.

I have very simple tastes. An ex-girlfriend used to tell me I have the palate of a kid because there are only five or six foods that I love. And if you rotate them on a regular basis, that's all I need to eat -- like arugula, spinach, and grilled chicken.

I know I can only do as much as I can do... Although I have so many ideas of my own, I'm still very interested in helping to cultivate and encourage some promising new artists. But there are a lot of people and, unfortunately, a very small window.

Flying radio-controlled airplanes is my guiltiest pleasure. Only God would give me a hobby where I'm looking up to the sky. It's the only time where I am able to focus and concentrate on nothing but looking up. It's a fascinating hobby.

We don't have to wait for people to green light our projects, we can create our own intersections.

As far as the illusion of the fame, yes, I can definitely appreciate it.

You let your past destroy you, or you use it to create something better.

What I have learned in this life is you can never be ashamed of where you come from.

When you haven't forgiven those who've hurt you, you turn back against your future. When you do forgive, you start walking forward.

You put some Vaseline under your eyes at night and under your chin, and you put a little bit on your chest and you'll avoid stretch marks and I'll get you some Vaseline, you can change your oil and fry chicken with it, too, but you best make sure you have something.

The question that a lot of people ask me all the time is how did you make it? The truth be told, it was nothing but the grace of God.

Once you're truly happy with yourself alone, that's when you are safe to find the right person to spend the rest of your life with.

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.

People say the truth hurts. Hell no, it hurts even more if you do a whole bunch of foolishness to try and avoid it.

Growing up, there was always music around, whether across the street, or on the next-door neighbor's stereo. So, as in life, music is always around, and it helps to heighten any emotion. Music is amazing.

A mother's love is stronger than distance, more powerful than time and can transcend the grave.

I never thought of myself as a mogul, but it's really great to be in that position.

You can,t make yourself happy by causing other peoples misery -Tyler Perry The Family That Preys.

I don't cook, so my favorite dish to prepare is something on the takeout menu.

Don't make a black woman take off her earrings.

I tell people, if you're thinking about suicide, all that stuff I've attempted and thought about it. If you think about it, life gets better. The key to life when it gets tough is to keep moving. Just keep moving.

Seeing people laugh definitely inspires me, and so does seeing people get life lessons about living better.

I live my life outside of the box because when I die they're going to put me into one!

The road that I'm on is a path that I didn't choose. It chose me. I'm just trying to walk it, and to do the best that I can to honor and respect it.

I totally give credit to God for all of this stuff, because if I had tried to make these things happen, I couldn't have. To have all these things happen has been absolutely amazing. The road that I'm on is a path that I didn't choose. It chose me. I'm just trying to walk it, and to do the best that I can to honor and respect it.

Keep your dreams ALIVE. No matter how hard it gets, no matter how many people talk about you; they're going to throw dirt on you but that's alright, when they put you in that box (after your dead), they're going to put dirt on you some more, so that's okay -- GO, don't be afraid, have NO FEAR.

There were only 3 people that I wanted to meet in life, Nelson Mandela was one of them. What a life, what a journey, what a man. Thank you for passing this way! God bless your resting soul!

If you've ever watched anything that I do, and you completely give it a chance and take the blinders off, and you'll understand that the underlying theme of everything I've done has been about forgiveness, learning to move on.

Focus on one thing, make it your priority, and stick with it no matter what!

God gives everyone a lane and no one can beat you in your lane. Just stay focused on Him and what you are supposed to do. And everything will be alright.

I'm just enjoying my life.I suggest you try it.

It's a clear day Sonny, L A N D.

I haven't had a worst business decision, because I believe all things work together for good.

I've been doing television for quite some time, so Oprah Winfrey and I thought it was a great idea to partner up. I am going to buy my own network and I thought it was a great opportunity for both of us. It's a win-win because I get the opportunity to give her what she needs, which is programming, and at the same time, I get to learn how to run a network.

I'm always on to something else. It's like, I'm sitting here now jotting down notes for something that's in my head. There's always something going on in my head, and I have to just keep executing.

You need to know that you can't honor God when you're chained to the voice and opinions of man.

I have this huge, huge fan base of people who've never seen a Broadway show, but I think it's a great introduction to what Broadway is because my shows are not that. I think that if you're getting people to go to theater then somebody should be celebrating that.

I feel like I express myself, as an actor. Whatever the character is put in front of me, I try to bring truth to it, whichever way it lands. I try to bring as much truth to it and make it as believable as I can. I think that's the job of an actor.

The important thing for me is, and what I'd like people to know is that, one particular genre does not make it whole. There are many, many different genres and if you ever gave it an opportunity open mindedly, I think you'd find some pretty interesting things there.

There were certain areas in the country where I couldn't go without being stopped and asked for autographs and pictures for years.

When I have absolutely nothing to do, and I find myself in the middle of all of it going, "Wow!" When nothing's going on, that's when I get to stop and really appreciate the journey.

What rings true is that everything we grow through in life will work out for our good.

I'm very open to fresh talent, and I love the underdog, people who have been counted out, because they come in with a different type of hunger. I'm all for the underdog, so I'd like to talk to anybody who shows up with that sort of thirst.

I've been pretty transparent with all that I've done. I think my work speaks a lot for who I am. So, I don't think there's a particular thing I'd like them to know.

I don't like popcorn, and I think it's so annoying when people have popcorn in the theaters. That is the loudest food.

I want to be remembered as a guy who inspired, encouraged and made people laugh.

I don't just do a movie to do a movie. Of course I want to amuse people, but some of Madea's greatest moments are when she gets to talk about child rearing and bullying and all kinds of things like that.

There was our house in New Orleans. Two blocks in front of us were these beautiful mansions and two blocks behind us were the ghetto, projects, and that's where I had to go to school, but I would always pattern my life looking forward. It was almost literal.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope of what happened to you from being different.

As a member of the Feeding America Entertainment Council, I recognize our mission to spread the word and rally the country in the fight to end hunger.

Developing a good work ethic is a key to success. Apply yourself at whatever you do, whether you're a janitor or taking your first summer job, because that work ethic will be reflected in everything you do in life.

Everybody's got skeletons in the closets. Every once in a while, you've got to open up the closet and the let the skeletons breathe. Half the time, the very thing you think is gonna destroy you or ruin you is the very thing that nobody cares about.