Lily Tomlin Quotes

Writing is inherently scary.

I always feel terrified whenever I put my work out there to be seen, to be scrutinized. I think it's a very vulnerable thing that we are asked to do.

Putting your work out there is scary!

'Writing' always means 'not writing' to me because I will do anything to put it off. I think this is mainly because writing anything down and then handing it over to a third party - especially in comedy - is such an exposing act that you naturally want to delay the process.

Why do waiting rooms have to be so ominous?

I think that any time you share a secret, you're a little nervous about people's reaction to it.

TV has been so far outside my comfort zone.

Going out and trying new stuff on an audience is a scary thing.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

Even just making albums - which was more within the structure that I've worked in for years - you have no idea how people will respond. You don't know if it'll be any good whatsoever. It can be terrifying.

I'm a guy so I equate vulnerability with fear. What makes me fearful. I feel vulnerable when I release material, my work, to the world, and I have no control over the outcome. Those are very vulnerable moments. I'm getting married on Friday.

I'm excited and terrified to write something new.

The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.

Someone asked the Swiss physician & author Paul Tournier how he helped his patients get rid of their fears. He replied, 'I don't. Everything that's worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids--all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.'

If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.

Fear for a linchpin is a clue that you're getting close to doing something important.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

Every song that I start to write, I wonder if I'll be able to write it.

Sure,” she said, and hugged the laptop bag closer. “What could go wrong?” Michael’s eyes flashed to meet hers in the rearview mirror. Besides everything, I mean,” she said.

To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left.

Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out. You know it can't go wrong, you're sure it can't go wrong... But it might.

I just want to make a beautiful film. I've had it in my head for so long, so I want to try. Every now and again I get scared. And that's not really how I operate in songwriting or as Sia the artist, the singer. I don't operate from a place of fear. But this is such a new area for me. I still have some insecurity. So, like, once a week I get washed from the top of my skull down to my toes with this vomitous feeling of fear. I think, "Just don't do it. You don't have to do it. You're already a singer and a songwriter. Really, you don't have to make a movie.".

When you leave the familiar and enter the unknown, your fear becomes refined by experience and hammered into tools of survival on the anvil of anxiety.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.