Quotes About Self-doubt

There's a lot of insecure, sad people in any profession.

You have to have a certain single-mindedness if you want to reach the top of the profession, and I'm not sure if I've got that cold-eyed egomania that perhaps is needed to get to the top. So as long as I can keep paying the mortgage and keep myself interested, I'll be happy.

You question, as anybody should, the overarching worth of your profession, right? So that's a question I've often asked myself.

You sort of feel when you are given an award, you feel like, well then you have got to do something to deserve having been given the award. It worked differently with me cause I didn't feel that I had done enough.

I used to write books and plays in my mind, but I doubt that any of them would have been above the level of the cheapest dime novel.

I don't even know if I can call myself a director.

When I first started, it was a dirty word to say you made clothes for people to wear... I was a little ashamed of it. You didn't always feel you were this amazing creative force.

My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.

I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night convinced I've made a disaster.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

I'm not bamboozled by the fact that people are disgusted by me. I'm not my biggest fan either.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

I always enjoyed singing but I was never convinced that I had a big voice like that, that was distinctive, I just thought I can sing in the choir.

You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.

I was afraid to express myself for a while.

The greatest enemy one ever faces is one's own self.

I don't really exude that 'it' factor.

My biggest enemy for the longest time was my head. When I first became successful, it made me anxious because I was overthinking everything, and you hear so many 'fail' stories.

I want to be perfect. I don't want to fail. And you always fail.

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.

I know that I have a good career and I'm really busy, but there's always that part of my mind that's like, 'You're not doing enough, nobody knows you're alive, you're failing.'

My biggest fear, the only fear that I have is failing. I hate to fail at anything that I do and that's really my only fear in life, to be a failure.

I have a fear of failure, letting someone down, contradicting myself.

Your enemies love your failures, sure. But what they love even more is to see you brought so low by those failures that you never get up again. Sometimes enemies aren't even external. Often, our biggest critic, our greatest enemy, is ourselves.