Eva Mendes Quotes

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

I'm kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.

Once I actually get in the studio and I start working, I'm fine, but it's just getting there and these hours of torment with myself and self doubt, thinking 'I'm useless' and 'Who am I, conning myself into thinking I can do it again.'

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn’t poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren’t.

Every single time I step into the studio, I say, 'Can I still do this? Do I still have it? Have I ever had it?' I suppose there's a good amount of self-loathing that goes into any form of artisanship.

Creative people are very insecure people because they don't know whether people like them or are in awe of them. That insecurity always comes out. It makes them a better actor, I feel.

The essential truth is that sometimes you're worried that they'll find out it's a fluke, that you don't really have it. You've lost the muse or - the worst dread - you never had it at all. I went through all that madness early on.

I am quite an insecure person, and I think that, like any director, if I'm asked about my vision for a piece, I feel very vulnerable.

Every time I create something, just before that there's a kind of - you're feeling very low, you're feeling very down and insecure. Then you create and then it's fine. This is the way I observe me doing it.

I panic every time I put out a record. I think every artist does.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

Every artist, true artist, struggles with an overwhelming sense of feeling like you're not worthy.

The idea for each of the stories in this book came in a moment of belief and was written in a burst of faith, happiness, and optimism. Those positive feelings have their dark analogues, however, and the fear of failure is a long way from the worst of them. The worst - for me, at least - is the gnawing speculation that I may have already said everything that I have to say, and am now only listening to the steady quacking of my own voice because the silence when it stops is just too spooky.

'YOU AREN'T TALENTED' - it cuts right to the fear of every artist.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.

There's only one passion in most artists more violent than their desire for admiration: their fear of identifying the nature of such admiration as they do receive.

Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.

I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.

The temptation to quit and start over infects every creative process I've ever been in. Frustration and boredom always fuel this self-doubt.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

I sometimes have a horrible fear of turning up a canvas of mine. I'm always afraid of finding a monster in place of the precious jewels I thought I had put there!

Part of being an artist is that you are always concerned you don't have what it takes. It... keeps us honest.

Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.

I can't watch myself on screen without dying a little bit inside. And there are lots of moments when I think, 'What am I doing as an actor? I can't act!'