R. Madhavan Quotes

I feel like I'm always fighting not to repeat myself.

The temptation to quit and start over infects every creative process I've ever been in. Frustration and boredom always fuel this self-doubt.

When faced with the inevitable fatigue that comes with the recycling of speeches and the recycling of thoughts in a rather small stream of vortex, I am urged to not be ashamed of recycling.

After I did 'Mr. Show,' I was basically just a writer for a while. I was really young, and I kinda was like, wow, I'm 27 and I was already on this iconic show, and now I can just coast. But no one likes coasting, because you have to fill your day with stuff.

In next five to 10 years I probably would have done my best work, but I was afraid of having another 10 or 15 years ahead of me and feeling stale, so this was an opportunity to reinvigorate myself.

I didn't want to be 40 or 50 years old and still playing clubs, I didn't feel like I was making any progress, and I actually gave the band notice at one point. I began to have doubts about my abilities.

I went right from wunderkind to washed up. Old. Been around too long. That's just the way I feel. That's my internal dialogue.

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

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.

At the top of my career, I wasn't at the top of my game.

After 'Place Beyond the Pines,' honestly, I was sick of myself. Sick of my own ideas. I wanted to do an adaptation, but everything I'd been reading, I just didn't understand it.

One of the hazards of making a major discovery early in your career is the burden of expectation, not helped in my case by becoming a wife and mother soon afterwards. I'm sure some people think it was a flash in the pan.

Somewhere my dad gave up. He was really so successful at his level that after a point he could not handle failure.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move forward. It is a loop-an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, "God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap.

Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

From Wall Street to Drive was almost a year, when I didn't do anything 'cause there was just nothing that was significantly different from the things I'd done before. There was just nothing to explore.

People don't stand up and protect their dreams because they get spoofed in a way.

I think any time you set out to make something, anybody is going to be confronted by those voices in their head that say "You don't need to do this. Someone else can do this better. You should probably just quit right now."

You never get over the fear of writing.

Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

I've had a five- or six-year down-spell as a writer, and now that most of the other contracts are cleared or down to the last book, I have a chance to do what I want to do - specifically, something set in New Orleans.

Blocks usually stem from fear of being judged. If you imagine the world is listening, you'll never write a line.

Have pity on those who are fearful of taking up a pen, or a paintbrush, or an instrument, or a tool because they are afraid that someone has already done so better than they could.