Quote: “If you adopt this career, and especially if you’re any good at it, you are a certain kind of person. You’re a person—or so I’ve found in my experience—with a skin too few—a person who is plagued the whole time with diffidence. A terrible feeling of inadequacy, of apprehension that you can’t do what’s required of you. People say that actors and actresses are vain. That isn’t true. They’re not conceited about themselves; they’re obsessed with themselves, yet, but they need reassurance the whole time…. And that makes them, in an ordinary, human, unprofessional word: nervy…. And the worse their nerves are, the better they are at the job.”
Character: Dr. Gilchrist
Chapter/Story: 9—II
Book Title/Copyright: The Mirror Crack’d [The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side], 1962
