Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

It's weird: I always feel like my career is about to end. Like someone is coming to get me. I don't know. I guess I need to find a better balance, but without my work, I don't think I would be alive. If I don't work, I don't live.

I'm afraid I'm a complete workaholic perfectionist.

How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.

I'm always working. If I'm not in my studio I become quite nervous.

I get a little too obsessive with work.

There's a period just before you start a movie when you start thinking, I don't know what in the world I'm going to do. It's free-floating anxiety. In my case, though, this is over by lunch the first day of shooting.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.

I stress out a lot. Being a perfectionist doesn't help with that!

Every time I start a film I feel like I'm starting the first time, ever.

I want to be good all the time, so I feel anxious. But if you weren't like that, you'd be dead, wouldn't you? If you went out happy down the road, la la la. I've never been like that. I don't want to be.

The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.

I've worried more and more as the years have gone on. The more you're seen to be doing well, the more stress there is. You feel you ought to consider things more, and be more fussy - there's further to fall. All these little worries.

I've never told anyone this before, but I'm an obsessive-compulsive. I go back to my hotel room every evening and put the coat hangers back in order and open my bag and rearrange it. It takes a lot of my time, but if I don't do it I can't sleep.

I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton.

I have absolutely no rituals or routines other than I work obsessively and think constantly about my work, to the dismay and discomfort of everyone I employ. And my family.

I don't believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but most of the novelists I've ever known are in love with influence. They thrive on it.

I become absolutely reclusive when I'm not working, to the point where I question whether I can actually do it again.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety; my mood is irritable. My night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention.

Yes, I go a little bit crazy when I'm not working, which is an issue for me. My background is you go to work; that's what you do.

I constantly have little panic attacks of wanting to change something on a production level, but I let go.

There is a lot of pressure on pop stars, and I think a lot of it is the pressure that we put on ourselves. In our minds, we build up these huge, huge standards that we think people want from us, and actually, when you break it down, people just want you to make music and perform to the best of your ability, but anxiety can stop you from doing that.

I really personalized the pressure to make a good 'Toy Story' film. It made me physically sick at the beginning. Literally, I wanted to throw up in the morning because I was just so racked with stress.

Every parent just wants their child to be happy and to protect them. I should be the happiest I have ever been with my career, family and friends, but I can honestly say I am never happy in myself now. I constantly worry about them.

In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year. On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety.