Quotes About Self-doubt

All artists are terribly insecure people. They are desperate to be noticed.

The line between reality and illusion is getting blurry. Sometimes I really do think everyone hates me. Sometimes the crazy is all I've got. My head's pounding again. I hate all this: the pathology and the defiance and the confusion about whether I'm getting better or worse. And yet it is so totally me. I know that none of it ends here tonight. Not by a long shot.

When he was younger it seemed like the only time he wasn't afraid was when he was angry. He'd been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way he could think of to be strong was to attack the world around him.

The old Quentin might have done it, but he wasn't a creature of fear anymore, jumping at his own shadow. Never knowing who he was or why. When he was younger, it seemed like the only time he wasn't afraid was when he was angry. He had been so full of fear and self-doubt that the only way to feel strong was to attack the world around him.

There's a huge part of me that's thinking about perfection. I have to fight that urge, to try to live in the moment, reach for something that I might be hearing, and not second-guess myself.

I left school at 15 feeling fairly useless and not really up to scratch in my education. And I still suffer sometimes from that lack of education.

In the romantic sense, I'm pretty useless with guys. If I see somebody who I'm attracted to, generally I just think, 'Oh well, he's not interested in me.' The only time that I talk to guys is when they talk to me first.

Usually I'm frustrated when I look at my films and I don't believe that I've made a real transformation beyond my usual sets of gestures and expressions. I still have this nagging feeling that it's me, that I didn't create a unique character.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

The worst time for me is in the final few hours of taking a track that you've worked on for two years and bouncing it down to the final stereo mix. The overwhelming emotion for me is complete and utter fear that I've made a mistake. I'm scared. Afterward, I obsess endlessly about it.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.

Trust me: Every entrepreneur has felt like an utter loser at some point.

I always feel like a vague failure in L.A. - it always makes me feel like I should somehow be different than I am. And I don't know why.

I'm not vain, I'm insecure.

I was very insecure at the beginning of my career. I didn't value my talent. I would have probably skipped signing up for movies that I didn't want to do if I had understood that I had been accepted and people liked my work.

I now doubted myself. Innocencce was finite and could not be regenerated. Like spinal fluid. I knew this because I had run out.

I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.

Portia remembered her interview in the small office upstairs...in which she had been so shy, so terrified about not being good enough, not getting this thing, this chance, which she had only just discovered she wanted very badly.

They were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives...the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren't brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.

My existence was beginning to cause me serious concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?

Mrs. Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

A man needs understanding because he is existentially alone. He stares into the darkness. That was the difference between men and women, Leo thought. Men need groups and gangs and sport and clubs and institutions and women because men know that there is only nothingness and self-doubt. Women were always trying to make a connection, build a relationship. As though one human being could know another.

My existence began to worry me seriously. Was I not a simple spectre?

When I can't see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn't help much.