Quotes About Self-doubt

Feeling inadequate has always been my biggest problem.

The seventh and eighth grade were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I have ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit . . . It was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn't.

The Gremlin is the doubting voice inside your head that's always carping, always telling you that you're not doing things well enough, or that you should be doing something else

In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff's characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: "It's a thing you don't talk about—not until you're well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start.

So you see, fear is just another manifestation of insecurity. What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.

We're as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren't we? Maybe better.

The point is that you feel uncomfortable, and you're trying to talk yourself out of it because you think you're supposed to be nice.

And at twelve, heading for adulthood, a child fears that the way she is at that moment is all she's ever going to be.

Why do I do anything?' she says. 'I'm educated enough to talk myself out of any plan. To deconstruct any fantasy. Explain away any goal. I'm so smart I can negate any dream.

I don't feel like I have the intelligence to really inhabit a consistently high level of prose.

[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

A jealous husband doesnt doubt his wife, but himself.

Jealousy is the suspicion of one's own inferiority.

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

The very fact that you can even wonder if you're going crazy means you very likely aren't crazy. Real nuts don't question their own nuttiness. They think they're the only normal ones. That's why they're nuts.

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

Deep inside him, so deep even he would not have known how to excavate it, was the rank, gangrenous fear that he was not entirely the intellectual being he had long ventriloquized.

And it's that impulse to negate our own impressions that is so astonishingly powerful.

It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.

Sometimes she thought she was mostly a collection of minor talents.

The feeling often comes over me that I am not at all remarkable; it is fun to plan a career, but in all probability I shan't turn out a bit different from any other ordinary person.

Cada noche se decía: "Debe ser menos hermosa de lo que creo, es mi imaginación que se desboca", y cada noche se desmentía y la encontraba más bonita que el día anterior.

But do I have "low intelligence"?

I am unlovable...I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even - in my sillier moments - in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting or one of Those Nights comes along.