Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.

It took me a long time to even dare to envision myself as a writer. I was very uncertain and hesitant and afraid to pursue a creative life.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

Now I'm where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven't won at all. Running for my life and never looking back in case there's someone right behind me shoot me down and say he always knew I'd fall. When the crazy wheel slows down where will I be? Back where I started.

I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete - that's what scares me.

I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person.

As a typical creative, I am all ego and insecurity!

It's like, if someone asks me to do something and it seems like a really exciting project, but I maybe really frightened about it, nine times out of then I'll say yes imminently because then I can worry after I've said yes!

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

Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.

I think that battle that you have almost never goes away. You're always questioning and hoping that stuff goes a certain way, that you get a certain reaction.

I've got to overcome that tendency to hide what I write or throw it away.

Everybody has had that experience of really wanting to do something and being afraid.

I get in my own way a lot. I feel a lot more confident than I... am.

One thing I learned about that I always knew about myself - that I always been afraid of myself.

I've always been afraid of who I am and not knowing what I can do.

Somewhere my dad gave up. He was really so successful at his level that after a point he could not handle failure.

You know how you get close to something you want and then you start doing things to ensure that you don't quite get it? I did a lot of that.

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

As an actor, you deal with so much rejection and humiliation. When the good things come around, you tend not to trust your instincts.

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts . . . and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.

We fear our highest possibility. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments.

Then came a bigger fear. Not the threat of imminent injury, but the fear that if I didn't go back up, I would be a chickenshit forever.

I think any time you set out to make something, anybody is going to be confronted by those voices in their head that say "You don't need to do this. Someone else can do this better. You should probably just quit right now."