Quotes About Self-doubt

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

You may call it having standards. What you should be calling it is perfectionism.

Writing, as we are taught to do it, becomes an antihuman activity. We are forever editing, leaving out the details that might not be pertinent. We are trained to self-doubt, to self-scrutiny in the place of self-expression.

Perfectionism is fear in a fancy dress.

Many artists begin a piece of work, get well along in it, and then find, as they near completion, that the work seems mysteriously drained of merit. To therapists, this surge of sudden disinterest ... is a routine coping device employed to ... ward off vulnerability.

If only we could give ourselves permission to write "badly," so many of us would write very well indeed.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't ... your mood doesn't really matter. Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you are doing is just plain junk ... stop judging yourself and just let yourself write.

I'll look like an idiot

If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn't been Tony.

The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

The next day, all that stopped him from feeling pure exultance was the question: had it been too easy?

Everything seems to be working. Except me. I'm broken.

Your failures and your faults, they stick with you. They glob into ugly, cancerous growths inside you and make you want to die.

I never really even tried. But if I'm not a New York actress, what am I? I'm a person who takes a subway from the outer boroughs to lower Manhattan office every morning, who spends her days answering phones and doing copying, who is too disconsolate when she gets back to her apartment at night to do anything but sit on the couch and stare vacantly at reality TV shows until she falls asleep. Oh Godm it really was true, wasn't it? I really was a secretary.

There was never any question, not even in the darkest moment, that the hero would conquer both his enemies and his self-doubt.

It came to me that it was possible to be afraid of your own fear, and that such a phenomenon was utterly ridiculous.

Who could imagine that one could be so ridiculed, so humiliated by oneself?

Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact, man's hidden dread of his inability to deal with existence.

Most men have an insecurity of some sort. But we're brought up to believe that we can't show them.

As an actor, I felt I couldn't compete. I wasn't as cute as the leading man; I wasn't as brilliant as Robin Williams.

Man, I didn't think I stood a chance. I mean, she was way out of my league.she still is.

The only reason people write is because they are not wonderful men.

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.

She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man.