Quotes About Fear

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

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.

The hardest thing about writing, for me, is facing the blank page.

The process of writing and directing drives you to such extremes that it's natural to feel an affinity with insanity. I approach that madness as something dangerous, and I'm afraid, but also I want to go to it, to see what's there, to embrace it. I don't know why, but I'm drawn.

I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent, and I'm not your mommy; I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

It's heaven to know that it's still possible to run, though she doesn't know what she's running from.

What will I do if I find myself with a heart? Lose it constantly, I imagine.

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

Old Sophia threw a potato at him. 'Without my fear, I'd be a simpleton,' She called after him. To the women on the platform she said, 'I consider that a potato well spent.

Little Miss Muffet and Mary Contrary, Found in a garden a spider most scary: It stung them and hung them to save them for dinner, A fate that awaits the conventional sinner.

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

How brave that had made her feel, and how vulnerable too.

The wind was picking up, and the Scarecrow shivered.

A bird in the house is a sign someone will die soon.

I may not be sure if monsters exist but I'd rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

But is life worth living in the wrong form?" said Elphie. "The interior doesn't change," she answered, "except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.

The typical male response to happiness, thought Melena: to predict its demise.

You could catalog the thousand ways people shrink from life, as if chance and change are by their nature toxic, disfiguring.

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.

I didn't want to be like the novelist who spent so much time rewriting his first sentence that he never wrote his second.

When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

from Lewis's brilliant essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children": When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.