Mel Tillis Quotes

When I'm nervous, I stutter, and I had to keep stopping and starting.

Part of what was in the ether all around me growing up, until I was between 19 and 20, was a terrible, debilitating stutter. It was part of what made me very reclusive as a kid.

People only stutter at the beginning of the word. They're not afraid when they get to the end of the word. There's just regret.

I'm not much of a public speaker.

When I went to Los Angeles right after high school, I got some acting jobs, and I never, ever wanted to be an actress! Public speaking and acting make me want to vomit. But I have never been nervous singing. When it comes to public speaking, I stumble on my words, sweat, and pull at my clothes.

I was a closet stutterer.

You tend to get reluctant to talk about anything until the day before filming.

The first time I got up in front of an audience was terror, abject terror, which continued for another four or five years. There still is, a little bit.

I think stutterers are funny. And I know it's rude and politically incorrect to laugh at stutterers. But I think it is okay because I know why they're funny. They make people nervous. People think, when on earth are they going to get the word out, so they start laughing out of their own nervousness.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it's funny. And it's not funny. It's not.

But if you put a script up in front of me to read, or a cue card, I couldn't do it without stuttering.

I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school.

It's nothing to be ashamed of to have a stutter.

The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.

I used to have trouble in front of an audience. I felt uncomfortable.

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

I'm shy at public speaking, which is tough.

I had a stutter when I was a young. I went to speech therapy.

Sorry, public speaking isn't really my strong side.

I'm suffering from stage fright. I don't like making speeches. [...] I'm the kind of introvert actor who likes putting on other people's clothes and pretending to be somebody else, which is completely crazy choice of profession. So, I don't enjoy public speaking and I have every sympathy for anyone who has to do it and doesn't enjoy it.

Although I was entirely relaxed on camera, if I had to stand up and say something to an assembled group of people, I was rendered all but inarticulate.

The happiest stutterers, I learned, are those who are willing to stutter in front of others.

I think my worst nightmare is standing up in front of a group of people.

I still start to get panicky each morning before I go on television. I'll say, 'I'm in awful shape, something is wrong,' and if I start to look like I'm going off the deep end, Jimmy Straka, the stage manager, will say, 'You're all right. Calm down.' Then Bryant Gumbel will grab me by the leg or something.

The most terrifying thing in the world was having to give a speech at my girlfriend's wedding. I was physically shaking and sweating the entire time.