I just used to go to the same auditions with all these other kids I went to school with. I didn't feel like I was really good at acting. I didn't feel like I was a really talented person that needed to be doing this.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
I still believe that at any time the no-talent police will come and arrest me.
I regrettably wasted time at university by being overwhelmed and intimidated by the talent of other composers. I felt stuck and didn't know what I was doing there. I enjoyed my experience, but I didn't grab it in the way I would now.
Every artist, true artist, struggles with an overwhelming sense of feeling like you're not worthy.
Why has God given me such magnificent talent? It is a curse as well as a great blessing.
Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Most artists think they're frauds anyway.
I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.
Hiding a talent is not exclusive to any one particular group of people: young, old, black, white, Latin. It doesn't matter. It's universal. The idea that you have a gift or talent is always kind of threatening.
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling.
