Quotes About Fear

I've read that Steven Wright's style was born out of genuine nervousness.

I think it can be very safe to go to O'Hare and Wrigley and Sox park and Soldier Field, but you have to deal with some reality. Just because a threat is not specific and verifiable doesn't mean nearly what it used to mean, in terms of you being able to sleep well at night.

If I were afraid of wrinkles, I'd probably be hiding in a cupboard, because I have a lot of them.

I'm worried that the audience is being conditioned. That's my real fear. Because if they don't want to see wrinkles on the screen, if they actually fear looking at them, then it's only going to get worse. Those of us who don't want to shoot up and cut and sew, we're just not going be cast.

Getting older is baggage for so many people but I don't spend time on things I can't control. Wrinkles don't scare me; they're a part of life, and I will and do embrace them, but I look at surgery, and that scares me.

Hats, giant shades and 60-plus sunblock are part of my summer repertoire. I don't want wrinkles, but it's skin cancer I truly fear.

For years, I've admired wrist tattoos, but I was always afraid that they would hurt - I'm kind of a weenie about pain. In fact, it's why I wear so many bracelets on my left wrist. The bracelets represented the words or phrases I'd want to get tattooed but didn't have the courage to.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

If I cannot speak or write about it, I struggle with the truth. When I speak out in an effort to process what I observe and attempt to stretch myself beyond my many inadequacies, people ask me am I not afraid of the government? I am scared of my inadequacies.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

I had liver disease. I'm completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story.

So at 19, I faced my first blank page as a professional writer.

My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me.

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 think everyone's a little afraid of being part of a trend, because you get compared to each other. Writers tend to have a lot of camaraderie, and when you're constantly compared to someone else, it kind of damages that camaraderie, but I think this is a great trend. I'm honored to be a part of it in many ways.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

Directly after Rock Hudson's death came the fears that gay writers and actors and directors would be denied jobs; who knew if they would live long enough to finish a feature film or television series? And would the unions force directors to give blood tests and ban actors who tested positive?

I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.

Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.