Jodi Picoult Quotes

Wire-walking in performance is one thing - I never fell, of course. If I had, I wouldn't be here talking about it.

From the age of 8, I learned that nothing in the entertainment industry is real. It's all fake. Your face, your clothes, what you say - it's all a fake.

I'm fortunate that I'm employed. And if you're in show business, of course, every night you go to bed and go, oh my god, tomorrow I'll never, ever work again.

Sometimes I find myself in this super-raw place onstage where I'm like, 'Maybe that's not the best thing. Maybe I need to shut down a little.'

Although I don't gamble in life - I've never played poker - I do gamble on stage. I gamble with myself: 'Can I do this?'

Like everybody in show business, you think you're going to wake up one day, and it's all going to be taken away from you. I think we all share an insecurity in that way, everybody in show business - the ones I talk to, anyway.

I grew up on the stage, where you just throw yourself into projects and don't get in your own way.

I felt like I was flying without a net. But once I realized that the audience was my partner, I was flying a jet, because the people would allow me to develop the character on stage.

Living as an actor is rather like living life on the trapezes in a circus. Every time you jump on, you have to pray that, when the time comes for you to jump off, there is another trapeze swinging your way.

With kiting, you have to land a trick, and in that instant you know whether you won or lost - I knew I could become the best in the world if I trained. But with acting, there are different variations; there's not a right or wrong way. It's so hard because it's so out of your hands. I have no idea what's going to happen!

People think what you are doing is real, on a TV show.

Acting is the most insecure profession in the world - you're insecure if you're successful, you're insecure if you're not. A tightrope walk without a net. It's a miracle I'm still standing!

Even the things we are certain about are only an illusion. We are born with a female side and a male side, and these two sides are always fighting and challenging each other. This is why anything we want to do, we have the other side of telling us not to do it, to be careful about it.

Every time I do something or release something or announce a new project, there's always that fear that it won't go well.

I've always wanted to try presenting and see what it was like, and you know, it could be a huge mistake.

I don't know if I'm going to be any good at sevens.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

The essence of show business is, if you see a tight-rope walker go across a tight rope, everybody claps. But, if you see him wobble, everybody gasps.

Hosting the Emmys is a challenge for me. I guess it's the equivalent of someone who needs to climb a mountain or jump out of a plane. It's that kind of thing, where this could go terribly wrong. And I love the feeling of when it goes right.

We ask the public to believe that every time they see an actress or actor that they are a different person.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

The stage floor was a stage of thin ice for me to tread. To hold my own or to sink through and die, never to be remembered.

I'm in show business. I believe in illusion and delusions and in holding aloft the bubble of a dream of some sort because, really, there are lots of reasons to look at the chasm. But art and music, these ineffables, they're just - they're the consolations of what human beings can create and make, and delight is accessible, you know, should you care to find it.

Most of the time when you do a job, a play or a film, you're wondering, "Will there be an audience?"

[My job is] a very high trapeze act, frequently with no net.