Harry Shearer Quotes

There's so much going on in the world. There's so much information being thrown at us - so many things are being sold to us, and we're being told how we should appear and how to be more successful, blah, blah, blah. How does that manifest itself? In the pressures, the stress, this need to escape.

Everyone gets scared from time to time. It's totally normal, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

We've always been told to pretend as if we're not afraid.

Ever since I can remember, over-expectation and pressure have been my worst enemies.

I carried around a lot of weight and anxiety - expectations of being a top draft pick and fulfilling those. It was really burdensome and not fun. Stressful. I had to go through some things before I finally turned that around and got back to playing for the right reasons.

Between 2008 and 2010 I exhausted myself because I wanted to please everyone.

I've cried multiple times after posting a video. So much work goes into each video that I don't know how I'm still alive.

I'm a worrier, an overthinker, and - if it's your type of thing - a 3x WNBA champion.

As a mother, you're only allowed to talk about the 'good' moments - not the ones when you've had enough and want to be on your own. Or just want to be a woman, not a mother.

I struggle with perfection.

I do feel like young people feel pressured to be extraordinary in a new way. Of course everybody is extraordinary in their own special way... but not everybody has been an activist, or volunteered somewhere incredible, or has perfect scores. So it's a lot of pressure to put on young people.

Some of the roles I play are very demanding. My body and brain can't separate what is real fear from what is played fear.

But there was a lot of pressure to achieve and to get things right, whether in school, on stage or with my peers and family.

Since I was little, I've always put a lot of pressure on myself.

Most of the stress we feel here in Silicon Valley is self-inflicted.

You really have to be winning by the time you get to 20 these days.

I think women can relate to the feeling that we're internalizing too many demands, and we're trying to be good at everything, but one day, we're going to snap.

We enjoy the expectations people have of us. The higher they are, the more pressure, the better we like it.

But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

I had intense anxiety, just with the acting and expectations. Am I good enough for this? This is so big. I'm on the cover of four magazines right now. Am I worthy of this? You question everything about yourself, and I did that. I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that I had the body and all of that.

I feel I always have to work harder, I have to impress all the time. Impress whom? With what? People say, "Just be yourself." Well, my anxiety is that people aren't going to want that.

Something has gone badly wrong with our culture. We've created a culture where really large numbers of the people around us can't bear to be present in their daily lives. They need to medicate themselves to get through their day.

People feel like they have to live up to being perfect or have a perfect life or be perfectly happy, and it just makes them more unhappy.

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.