Terry O'Quinn Quotes

I remember winning the first time, you know, suddenly everybody expects, well, okay, now he should win every time he tees it up, win six tournaments.

I don't want to carry the burden of a flop. I don't fall into that trap.

I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do 'Hamlet,' it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it.

'Leading man' just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

The most scared I'd ever been was the first time I sang at a rugby match, Australia versus New Zealand, in front of one hundred thousand people. I had a panic attack the night before because people have been booed off and never worked again... just singing one song, the national anthem.

It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character's head.

Playing Bill Clinton is really, probably, the scariest time of my career.

Actually, I failed drama in high school because of nerves. I wasn't able to memorize the words. I had complete stage fright.

A voice is very intimate. It's something of your own. So there's always this fear, because you feel naked. There's a fear of not reaching up to expectations. As you become more famous, people come and expect to hear something extraordinary, so you don't want to disappoint them. I feel this sense of responsibility.

My first time playing a main character was in 'Seventeen Years.' It was directed by famous Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan, but it wasn't a large commercial film.

You realise the responsibility of carrying a film on your shoulders when people are investing money in you and they recognise the hard work you have to put in.

If I sold something, and it didn't perform, I'd never forgive myself.

One time I nearly experienced failure was when I was acting in 'Hum Aapke Hain Kaun' in 1994. One day, I woke up and found that part of my face was paralysed.

Being at the centre of a film is a burden one takes on with innocence the first time. Thereafter, you take it on with trepidation.

I lost my voice for the first time. I was so bummed out, but it happens to every singer at some point in their career. I don't think most people understand, but I sing every night and sometimes we do five shows in a row, which is really bad for your voice.

But obviously you don't want to just be the guy who comes in and sort of spices up every movie. So yeah, definitely moving into more of a leading man role would be great, but on my own terms.

As an actor, you're always worried about getting stuck on a show that's not good because working actors need the paycheck. So being cast on a regular procedural, where everything gets wrapped up by the end of the episode, was always a fear of mine because that doesn't really test you as an actor.

Definitely, it's a fear of failure that drives me.

When you do a play, you have the kind of nightly feeling of accomplishment. But you also have the daily dread of the doing it every night. And because you're doing the whole thing every day, it's like climbing up the mountain every single night. With a movie it's like climbing the mountain very slowly, over months of filming.

Even on TV appearances or big shows, I don't know if I've ever been as nervous as I was my first time doing stand-up. I just remember getting offstage and sitting down, and my right knee was just shaking from the adrenaline.

It's properly scary playing a leading man. Growing up, I always wanted to be a character actor.

I've been acting since I was 9, but in college I entered the drama program, and I didn't excel at it at all, kind of for the first time.

In 2006, when doing a live stage show in Ireland, I tried for the first time to instantly induct a subject on stage, something I had never done before, nor did I know if it would ever work. The result almost cost me my career; the man I grabbed and instantly inducted went out cold and fell to the floor.

By the fourth or fifth take, I had gotten over the 'Oh my God, it's a Stanley Kubrick movie' and got around to doing a little bit of acting.