Quotes About Anxiety

Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn't be a writer without depression.

Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.

Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

A lot of writers whom I love, admire and call friends share this feeling, which is this fundamental idea that we're frauds. That we will be pushed out on to the stage, and it will be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.

I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

I think writers are very anxious.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.

The woman is bad-tempered because she's terrified.

The instinct towards panic, once experienced, cannot be unlearned.

Yes, I'm nervous. You'll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they're wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good. Perhaps being jittery helps me pay closer attention.

She looked as if she'd swallowed an assortment of her own hangnails.

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.

If I feel anxious about the fact that I haven't started, I become even more reluctant to start, which just makes me more anxious.

Procrastinators can't make themselves work—often, ironically, because they're so anxious about work that they have to distract themselves from it—but they can't enjoy free time, either, because they know they should be working. A regular work schedule can help procrastinators because progress and engagement relieve their anxiety.

People's biggest worries include financial anxiety, health concerns, job insecurity, and having to do tiring and boring chores.

Research suggests that people feel more in control and less anxious when engaged in habit behavior.

I feel too anxious to tackle my bad habits, but my bad habits are what make me anxious.

A regular work schedule can help procrastinators because progress and engagement relieve their anxiety.