Franz Grillparzer Quotes

I've had some ambivalent feelings about being an actor. I don't know that I've ever been totally and completely comfortable with it.

I tend toward characters who are more lost than found.

Every once in a while, I'll have a 'Do you know who I am?' moment, at least in my head. I hate that.

It's no accident that I'm not married and don't have kids yet. Because, despite what I've achieved in my career, I'm always wondering when somebody's gonna tap me on the shoulder and say, 'OK, the gig is up.'

Where I fit in is confusing to me.

I think I have let ego get in the way sometimes - the pendulum swung pretty strongly. I was maybe a little overconfident at one point in my time, and then I went way the other way and thought I wasn't capable of anything.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven't quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

I've seen pictures of me, and I look mean and arrogant. That's how I felt on the inside. I think now, 'Is that really me?'

You can be in the league and still feel like you're not in the league. That was the point I was at when I left Toronto.

I remember sitting by my window, wishing upon the stars that my skin condition would go away. I wondered, 'Why me?'

I doubt about myself. I think doubts are good in life. The people who don't have doubts I think only two things-arrogance or not intelligence.

Now if I seem to be afraidTo live the life that I have made in songWell it's just that I've been losing so long.

I am nothing! If you could know the dream of what I would like to be, you would realize how little I have accomplished.

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.

The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.

Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same time it does not seem so very important that she should love me. It is not her role. I am so filled with my love of her. And at the same time I feel that I am dying. Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings.

Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am.

I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that I was fooling somebody - I don't know who or what - maybe myself. I have feelings some days where there are scenes with a lot of responsibility, and I'll wish, 'Gee, if only I had been a cleaning woman.'

...You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don't know whether you're going to jump.

great. now i was starting to get jealous of myself.

I'm definitely not very insecure, but I have perfectionist tendencies, and I'll want things to be a certain way.

I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.

It is impossible to distrust one's writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.