Jacques Plante Quotes

Suppose you were working at your job one day, and you made a little mistake. Then all of a sudden a red light went on over your desk, and fifteen thousand people stood up and yelled at you that you sucked?

When football is your job, a lot of what you feel about yourself and about life can become attached to the outcome of those games. That's probably true about a lot of jobs, but we suffer our losses pretty publicly. When you're not getting the results you want, it becomes easy to get depressed.

I've been in pressure situations before. All my life it's been about pressure and having to get it done. Just because you say it publicly, it does not make me afraid of it or make me shy away from it.

At Real, psychological pressure on the players is much more serious than at United. This is good. At many clubs, you don't know the consequence of playing badly.

I was 15 on American Idol, and everybody had something to say. It was like I had my really awkward phase on national television, you know?

I think after coming off of 'American Idol'... people kind of expect you to just be awesome all the time, and we're still learning. I had a lot of stage experience, but it was in a 200-seat theater, you know - it wasn't thousands of people in front of me.

I love pressure in a different sort of way; I enjoy the pressure of getting out and performing for the public. Being compared and judged doesn't seem quite right to me.

Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.

I think it's funny because on 'Glee Project,' there's that added pressure, but with 'Glee,' there's no element of competition. No one's trying to dance better than anyone. But there's that added pressure of, 'So many people are going to watch 'Glee' this week. If I don't nail this dance, I look like an idiot.'

Showing your movie to an audience... it's like your kid doing a piano recital. 'Just let it not fail. Please.'

You know, every time it comes, every time that light comes on or every time that camera comes on, every time that microphone comes on, the Mac Man seek and destroy.

If anything bad happens, the media will leap on it. We're under a huge obligation to be successful.

Every time you have to come up with a new body of work for a new show, you're aware that people are just ready to rip you apart, they're just waiting for you to fall or make the slightest trip up.

When you get to an event like the Olympic Games, you can put too much pressure on yourself.

Right through to the end of the last World Cup game, I still couldn't bear the thought of not being perfect or letting people down.

Dance is such a stressful environment.

Oftentimes, I feel like the clock is on, and there's money at stake, and you gotta get up there and dance for grandma, and it better be great, and you better get it right.

Pressure makes me produce. Kills most guys. Mortifies 'em.

The time period I had in my life to look like an idiot and fail, and for no one to see that, came and went when I was 17. When you have early success, people are just lying in wait.

When you are nominated for the best player in Europe, the Ballon d'Or, playing in the Champions League, there is so much pressure. You don't know what will happen. This pressure is inside you - you always have it.

When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day.

If people don't like your act, it feels a little bit more like they don't like you as opposed to they didn't like that character... It's weird because on one hand, we make our living from being permeable and vulnerable, but we also have to have very thick skin.

My experience for myself as a performer is not one of high expectations.

Throughout a competitive career, you can certainly lose yourself trying to please the judges.

I realized that I didn't think I could stand the psychological battering that actors have to withstand. I just felt I wasn't cut out for that kind of self-promotion.