Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I say it in the writers' room all the time: My black is not your black. What's terrifying is that, just the same way we've all accepted that normal is white, everybody seems to buy into the idea that there's only one way to be black or one way to be Hispanic. That's as damaging as anything else.
From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me.
Here's what's terrifying about Ebola. Ebola is invisible. It's a monster without a face. With the science that we have now, we can perceive Ebola as being not one thing but as a swarm, and the swarm is moving through the human population and expanding its numbers. It has the qualities of a monster.
My technicolour dreamcoat is the only thing I've stolen. It would be a terrible shame if it went up in smoke after the trouble I went to get it. I was wearing it during the most terrifying moment of my life - the opening night of 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat' was fear beyond compare.
As an actor on a film, you have no control over the final product - your job is to make a director's vision come true. So, you need to have total faith in them and add your own creativity and opinions and energy, but you have to really give over responsibility, and sometimes that can feel terrifying.
Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I'm always angsty when I'm working my way through a first draft.
My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.
You're under the gun at all times because it's live TV. A lot of time, between dress and air, you're having to come with an entire ending to your sketch that gets an even better, bigger laugh - which is terrifying... People are filing into the audience, and you're writing a new joke for the end of it.
I would say runway is easier because your job is to look good or play a character that is just going somewhere. It's rather physical, whereas acting is terrifying because you're dealing with your subconscious, and those can be murky waters. But I definitely can say that I enjoy acting more as an artist.
From middle school to the first year of high school, I went to a school in Miami that seemed like a private country club. The whole cheerleader, football player, clique-y thing there was terrifying. Those people were so scary. They're the scariest kinds of people because they are idolized by their peers.
Politics is terrifying, very masculine, and not particularly encouraging to young blonde women - as a career, that is - and it was only when I was working in parliament that I thought to myself, 'Well, this is a tough industry; can an acting career be any more intimidating?' and I applied to drama school.
Senseless violence is, almost by definition, hard to understand. Not that I can understand terrorists who kill from hate, but at least we can identify a reason - a terrifying one, to be sure, grounded in a violent belief system - for what they do. Two gangs go to war. Extremists kill in the name of belief.
When I was eight or nine, I wrote a new version of 'Peter Pan' for the school play. They didn't use it - I imagine it was unperformable - but as recompense for not doing my script, I was offered any role, and instinctively went for Captain Hook. I came on trying to be terrifying, but everyone laughed at me.
To write a love song that might be able to make it on the radio, that is something that is terrifying to me. But I can definitely write a song about that chair over there. That I can do, but to sit and write a pop song out of the clear blue sky, that is very difficult and I admire the people that can do it.
I don't come from a comedy background or a stand-up background, but I think that sometimes there's a misconception that an actor who works primarily in comedy is a comedian. There's nothing wrong with being a comedian, but I'm absolutely not that. I can't think of anything more terrifying than doing stand-up!
At Westboro, the depictions of hell are extremely vivid. The only thing that changes in hell, according to the church, is your capacity to feel pain. As the capacity to feel pain increases, so does the pain. It's absolutely terrifying. I believed God was going to curse me for having left this group of people.
Steven Spielberg's name was all over 'Poltergeist,' and 'E.T.' was out the same year, which every single parent took their child to. So despite 'Poltergeist' being a horror movie, I convinced my parents to let me see it. It was terrifying. I guess this says a lot about me as a six-year-old, because I loved it.
My #1 job as a thriller author is to give readers the best white-knuckle thrill ride I am capable of. I am first and foremost in the entertainment business. If that suspenseful ride is also terrifying because it hits really close to home, then I am once again doing what I am supposed to do as a thriller author.
I had this really intense resolve. I would call universities and community colleges and say, 'I really want to go to college. How do I get to college? What do I do?' And they would say, 'You have to get an application. You have to get letters of recommendation.' It was terrifying. I had no idea what I was doing.
Sometimes when a scene is written or directed to be shouted or played incredibly angrily, I always think it's way more terrifying when someone is fuming and talks in a very calm way. I always want people to shout at me if they're angry - it freaks me out that whole thing of, 'I'm not angry I'm just disappointed.'
I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn't the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability. Which is actually terrifying if you're a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.
If you put a much older woman in 'Doctor Who,' they can identify with it. I think it's quite an interesting concept, and if you remember things like 'Grimm's Fairytales,' the older woman is often the villainess, often the terrifying figure - why I do not know, but often she is. I think it's an idea to be exploited.
My favorite experience, in general, probably was the 'Little Shop' experience, which probably was terrifying, frustrating, and exhilarating and amazing, but because it was the first, that was the one where I watched the show just launch itself for the first time and thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going to have a career.'
I am a nice human, but I've also got Italian in my family. My mom's side is Italian and my mom is a very scary human being. I get a lot of that intensity and snap straight into it from her. She's legit terrifying. Lovely girl. Lovely mother but when she gets angry, she's absolutely terrifying. She's a damn monster.
In medicine, there's a fairly large but still finite body of knowledge that you need at hand for most of your daily work. It takes a few years to learn it, but once it's there, it's there. With writing, on the other hand, every new book - indeed, every new story - is a fresh and terrifying reinvention of everything.
Whatever needed to be done, I need to know how to do it just as well as my wife. You know, for us to be able to really balance the parenting. It was very humbling, and it was also, um - terrifying. Because, you know, giving a baby a bath for the first time is one of the scariest things you can do on this whole earth.
When sighted people cover their eyes or find themselves in a dark place, this is something that's very terrifying for us. And so in general, we assume that this is what blindness means. But of course, it isn't. For people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age, that's not at all what blindness means.
My father, naturally, spoiled me when I was allowed to see him - flying to New York from Washington, alone, in those terrifying planes. He'd take me to Danny Kaye movies and rent a dog for me to walk in the park on Sunday - a different dog every Sunday - and then to have butterscotch sundaes with almonds at Schrafft's.
Well, I think in trying to make life seem real enough that one is moved to do something about the more atrocious things. By going really far afield into a completely fake world, maybe there's a chance to make things resonant somehow - or in this case, truly terrifying. To make it as bad as the real stuff that's happening.
I realize how myself and other people have started to almost fool ourselves that it's more important to us and more real than the real world, the offline world, and we value looking at our phone and pixels on a screen more than connecting eye to eye with a human being, which is terrifying to me because we're becoming robots.
They go on about banning size zero, but I think Hollywood stars are the worst perpetrators. Most models are naturally long and gangly, while a lot of these young girls in Hollywood have gone on extreme diets. Their concave chests and bony arms are terrifying. It's scary to think that normal teenagers are tempted to copy them.
C. Everett 'Chic' Koop became U.S. Surgeon General under President Reagan. He was a world renowned pediatric surgeon who had a tumultuous Senate confirmation process due to partisanship. Chic took office in January 1982, a time of 'tobacco wars' and a new and evolving terrifying disease that we ultimately came to know as AIDS.
Some of the natural world is appealing, some of it is terrifying, and some of it grosses us out. Modern people don't want to be dropped naked into a swamp. We want to tour Yosemite with our water bottles and G.P.S. devices. The natural world is a source of happiness and fulfillment, but only when prescribed in the right doses.
As people, right now, we're so over-stimulated in this world that I don't know what I'd do in Wyoming. I really don't know what I'd do. I would probably have a heart attack because I'd be so lonely, and I'd actually have to listen to myself think. That's a terrifying prospect for myself, and I'm sure many other people as well.
We go to the opening arguments or the closing arguments of a case, and we'd see which actor got the big one. I had a seven-page one once which just about killed me, and I thought, 'Oh, I'm going to get fired, that's it, I can't do it.' It was like a one-act play, and I had a few weeks to learn it, luckily. But it's terrifying.
Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation.
For most women, Greenham was a place of principle, growth and song. Often joyful, sometimes terrifying, and almost always cold. As it got harder, with constant evictions and mounting violence from a frustrated and humiliated police force, the women got more determined. It was a community with a shared purpose - to live in peace.
But for me, a physician, chief medical correspondent for a major network, and women's health expert, the thought of exposing myself to millions of people as someone who'd been completely blindsided by the suicide of my children's father, and by the impact of that suicide on Alex and Chloe and me, was nothing short of terrifying.
The life of an actor is very random. It can be exhilarating but terrifying - you do wonder day to day where the next job will come from. Some of my friends are very talented people, but you see them out of work - which can be tough. If you wanted that kind of security, though, I guess you wouldn't be an actor in the first place.
I remember hearing someone say that good acting is more about taking off a mask than putting one on, and in movie acting, certainly that's true. With the camera so close, you can see right down into your soul, hopefully. So being able to do that in a way is terrifying, and in another way, truly liberating. And I like that about it.
Roman history was kind of unavoidable where I was growing up. It was everywhere - all the place names and ruins and forts. My dad's a history buff, and I spent a lot of time on Hadrian's Wall. I became fascinated by the idea of what was so terrifying up there that the Romans built a 60-mile long, 30ft high stone wall to keep it out?
A friend of mine had died, and I went for an audition. It was weird and cathartic: the producer was very excited about the piece, but my brain wasn't working, and it all seemed really pointless and fickle. I told them I didn't want to be there any more, and left. It was the most terrifying and empowering audition experience I've had.
Ben Karlin is a friend of mine and was a writer on 'The Daily Show.' He's just put out a book and asked a bunch of writers from various disciplines to contribute. It was called 'Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me,' and of course I agreed, and then I actually had to sit down and write it. God, writing fiction is terrifying.
Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can't make any plans. You know you're not going on holiday, ever. There's no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes, and at one point, I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.
In 'Fighting With My Family,' there's a scene where I have to wrestle; I have to do the famous fight between Paige and AJ Lee. We actually did perform it in front of all those thousands of people. And just beforehand, we had a little dress rehearsal, and there were all these famous wrestlers going around and watching as well. Terrifying.
When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.
It's easier for me to write certain character types because of my own life experiences, but I find it too artistically limiting to only write about red-headed kids who grew up in small town Montana. That's really part of the fun of fantasy, I think. Our imagination is basically unlimited. Okay, that's a terrifying thing about fantasy, too.
Finding the discipline, the motivation, the focus, the passion to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen every day and then to make it come alive with characters and with plot is incredibly exciting and at the same time terrifying and frustrating, and sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes really hard.
One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal.
If Trump wants to corruptly direct the conduct of an investigation in order to out an FBI source who was helping our government investigate Russian interference in our electoral processes, well, Article II of the Constitution begins with these terrifying words: 'The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.'