James Nesbitt Quotes

I panicked in my 20s and 30s about whether I was doing the right thing. I was an excited puppy, wanting to please people and feeling guilty that I'd had a privileged education and an acting career.

My biggest enemy for the longest time was my head. When I first became successful, it made me anxious because I was overthinking everything, and you hear so many 'fail' stories.

To have a childhood surrounded by people like Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh sounds glitzy, but for years I wanted to repress it. I couldn't take that kind of power and success.

People think I should be a success, but I'm afraid of it.

It was tough. We went right from being teenagers to musical superstars with money and fame and attention. All of us had a hard time adjusting to it, especially me.

Just the life of doing what I do, being in the public eye, it's a stressful environment... You feel strange, self-aware, very foolish. Your third eye clicks on, just to try to maintain a healthy sense of perspective, and you think, 'What am I doing here? I'm just making a movie, and people want all these things from me.'

It has gotten worse as I'm becoming more successful. My nerves. Just because there's a bit more pressure, and people are expecting a lot more from me.

Hollywood's built on insecurity. People are trying to prove things. And I probably have that. I probably do. Probably guilty of it, in a way.

I'm not coping very well with all the attention, if I'm honest.

I obviously bring all of my insecurities along with me to any role that I tackle.

I would never complain about 'One Day' taking off, but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.

In many ways, I think I've always overcompensated. I was always almost too careful, because I knew if anybody ever found any way to doubt my work, then they'd start picking my life apart, too.

It's a really scary thing, having your dreams come true and seeing everything you ever wanted happening, getting the attention for it and then not knowing how to handle it properly.

I'm a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that's never healthy.

I play with a fear of letting people down. That's what motivates me.

Everybody in the entertainment industry is insecure.

In my 15 minutes of fame around 'Diamonds and Dirt,' it was not a healthy time for me because of my insecurity.

I'm still sometimes convinced that I'm just making all of this up and I'm actually somewhere drooling in a straight jacket. This success is such a bizarre thing.

I know now that much of the pressure that resulted in my breakdown was self-imposed. I didn't let myself enjoy the opportunities I was given, choosing instead to doubt myself.

I get in my own way a lot. I feel a lot more confident than I... am.

I feel like I'm in a weird state, and I wake up in Hollywood, and I've got a couple of studio movies underneath my belt, and I take these meetings with people. Sometimes it's this great, weird sense of oddness that comes at you, because I've never really stopped thinking the way that I started thinking.

It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any.

excessive fear and self-doubt that were the greatest detractors of personal genius.

I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.

Emotionally, I feel mostly out-of-depth, like I will never quite learn how to be what I should be. And that makes me feel pretty vulnerable a lot of the time.