Richard Lewis Quotes

I'm afraid that I won't do a good job when I go into an audition.

The pressure of success is suffocating.

In the past, before games, I would near enough make myself ill. Nerves and stuff.

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.

For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.

It's the weight of expectation that's the hardest to deal with, really, from my point of view.

Your nerves can get the better of you, especially when it's your first film.

There is such a hype and a big build up to me, and it's very hard to meet those expectations. That's been a big stress in my life.

Sometimes I panic to the point where I don't know what I'm thinking or doing. I have a full anxiety attack. I have them all the time anyway, but with auditioning, it's bad.

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

At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.

The pressure was huge going into London, definitely.

I think anytime you put the weight of the world on yourself saying, 'I have to perform,' or, 'I have to get a completion. I have to throw a touchdown,' nine times out of 10, I think you're going to fail.

I'm always nervous before playing a gig, to tell you the truth. It's what nearly did me in when I was with the Libertines. I just couldn't handle it.

Everybody's got high expectations for me. I just don't want to let anybody down.

Even when you are there on top, you feel the same nerves.

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.

Any fight I feel pressure, just the same as the last one, the next one will be just as important.

I'm just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. I'm entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard.

I am certainly suffering from a modicum of performance anxiety.

I had panic attacks during rehearsal. There were times when I really thought I wasn't going to be able to do it.

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.

Of course you're nervous going into a final.

I'm always thinking 'Don't mess this up.'

At the end of the competition, I played the Liszt concerto and I felt my head was on the block. Well, I won.