Fear of Mediocrity Quotes

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

I'm afraid of being average. I have a real fear of being just another linebacker.

I have a deathly fear of mediocrity and that nips at my heels and gets me into a lot of trouble.

We're hoping to succeed; we're okay with failure. We just don't want to land in between.

There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion, and there are others who cling to the rules because they fear that there is no passion there at all, and that if they let go they would simply remain where they are, foolish and unmoved; and they could bear that least of all. Living a life of iron control lets them pretend to themselves that only by the mightiest effort of will can they hold great passions at bay.

I'll always push the envelope. To me, the ultimate sin in life is to be boring. I don't play it safe.

As for the ridiculous fear of making things below one's potential abilities... No, there is the root of the evil. There is the hiding place of stupidity I must attack: vain mortal, you are limited by nothing.

Everything I've ever done was out of fear of being mediocre.

I'm intimidated by the fear of being average.

I don't want to be mediocre, this is the fear of my soul and my body.

Mediocrity is my biggest fear. I'm not afraid of total failure because I don't think that will happen. I'm not afraid of success because that beats the hell out of failure. It's being in the middle that scares me.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.

... what I fear in writing is the safe decision.

The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely 'decent' schools, the ones that are simply 'fine.'

She's no longer afraid to die. What she's afraid of is living, accepting the status quo.

I honestly think that's one of the greatest motivators of art - the fear of not making great art.

I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.