Marilyn Minter Quotes

That's the danger of having too much success. You lose that magic, that feeling of not being in control, which I feel now, it's too controlled.

As for the reasons behind my retirement, they mostly center around simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer, or at the very least ease into the graveyard of mediocre cartoons.

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

I have seen many successful people fail after they start fearing they might lose what they have built.

I thought that when you have more success that you'd feel more buoyed or feel more confident. But in fact my brain has the gift of switching it around and saying, 'Now people are expecting something. Now you're really going to let people down.'

Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?'

Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

There's always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If 'Pi' didn't work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don't think I would have gotten another shot at it. If 'Requiem for a Dream' didn't work out, they would have called me a 'one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump'.

Success is ever so dangerous. Once you rise to success, it's so easy to stop doing the things that made you successful.

I feel that, irrespective of a hit or flop, there's always pressure on an actor. When you give a flop, there's a pressure to ensure that the next film works, and when you give a hit, you want to keep it going. So, the pressure of success and failure is always there, and that's what keeps me going.

When you're doing so much, there's so much on your mind. The bigger the artist you become, you have to think a lot more. I'm trying not to overthink everything!

In fashion, the minute you say, 'I am successful,' is the minute you are going down.

The pressure of success is suffocating.

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.

I am really not interested or excited by repeating former successes.

I think it's one of the main negative emotional ingredients that fuels show business, because there's so much at stake and the fear of failure looms large.

When you're doing something that you think - that you know - is a breakthrough, you cannot obsess about the possibility of failure. That is just not a great place to go.

When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices.

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

I also just accept that I might never want to write a song again.

I think it's dangerous to think that you're successful, because then you become complacent.

The reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for future disappointment with every success that you deliver because you end up raising your audience's expectations.

The idea of writer's block or not having inspiration is totally terrifying to me.

When you're like, 'Yo, we gotta write a hit song, we need a hit song right now,' that never works. Every time that happens, I never write a hit song.

When you have success, people think you know what you're doing, and you start to agree with them, you think you can conquer the world. But you go from grandiosity to panic.