Sara Paretsky Quotes

Ninety percent of the time when I'm working, there's this very palpable sensation that I'm doing everything wrong and should just give up.

Every single time I start to do a picture, without fail, I feel as if I don't know what I'm doing.

If you're a writer, you're constantly doubting yourself.

Every time I make a movie I think that it's going to be my last one, I think that no one is going to show up. I always have this sense that they're all going to fail. I am scared to death.

I always think I'm terrible. So it's always a relief when I find out that I wasn't. I've had roles where I realized that I was in way over my head - and that is my biggest fear.

I was kind of scared of failing at acting.

There is always a point when one senses one's lack of skill, the doubt.

In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.

I'm in a complete state of panic before I begin something because I'm sure that it's going to be a complete disaster. I'm going to do a worse job than anybody could ever imagine anybody doing on the planet Earth.

Self-doubt kills talent.

These days I am ruled by doubt, and that is a difficult place to write from.

Pressure is something you feel when you don't know what you're doing.

My inner critic who had begun piping up about how hopeless I was and how I didn't know to write.

I feel like I'm not smart enough to answer the questions I'm asked.

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

I find it really hard to say anything coherent or interesting about the work I do.

For the first six or eight months at Juilliard I felt paralysed. I didn't know what I was doing.

I had a crisis of confidence and ran away from being a standup for a while.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

I am very self-doubting; it has come out of experience.

Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

I have a fear of failure.

So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.

I lack confidence as an actor.