Top 265 Terrifying Quotes

I went to hospital and they gave me an MRI scan and thought it was a non-cancerous tumour, because I had bled in my pituitary gland. It was very painful, so they ended up delivering John early. That whole process was terrifying. All I cared about was John.

That’s why fame freaks me out in a lot of ways – because how genuine of a connection can you have when you’re a commodity, and a conversation with you means bragging rights? That’s terrifying to me.

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender – not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

Shell has poured billions of dollars into offshore Arctic drilling, but no matter how much it spends, it cannot make the effort anything but a terrifying gamble. And if Shell, the most profitable company on Earth, can’t buy its way to safety in Alaska, nobody can.

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!

I get terrified the first day I’m on a film set. I get nervous walking down a red carpet. I find making speeches the most terrifying thing in the world.

Seriously, though, I think the only musical term that’s ever put a bee in my bonnet is ‘shred.’ I tried to peddle the term ‘Terrifying Guitar’ to the world, but it just didn’t stick. Now we’ve got ‘shred.’

You work on a play or movie, you have the whole script, so you’re constructing a performance based on the bible that you have. In TV, you don’t, so to actually invest in that and let that be the exciting part is terrifying and certainly leaves room for mistakes, looking back.

My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me – this is the truth – so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year.

Have you ever seen Glenn Beck in operation? It is the most terrifying thing. It’s so bad that you think he’s going to announce in a minute that it’s all a great con. He makes Sarah Palin look reasonable and steady.

I find it too terrifying to go out in L.A.

One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my God… I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with… Well, again, when you’re young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.

I’d auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and I didn’t get a place and it was terrifying.

The idea of doing stand-up is terrifying to me.

Real pirates were better than in movies, more daring and terrifying and cunning than any screenwriter could imagine. They operated during the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1650 to 1720.

The concept of the robot encapsulates both aspects of technology. On one hand it’s cool, it’s fun, it’s healthy, it’s sexy, it’s stylish. On the other hand it’s terrifying, it’s alienating, it’s addictive, and it’s scary. That has been the subject of much science-fiction literature.

Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying.

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.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Sometimes evil is in the form of a malignant clown, and sometimes evil is in the form of policy and legislators, and sometimes it’s a grinning death mask and it has something more viscerally terrifying about it.

I remember my first friend who got sick. It was 1981, and the disease was called the gay cancer. I don’t think the word ‘AIDS’ came out until ’84. I just remember it being terrifying as more people got sick. We didn’t know how you could catch it, you heard all kinds of crazy things.

I don’t know where the ideas come from, and it’s terrifying. They seem to be absolute flukes. When I was in my 20s, I’d walk around with a notebook all the time and make sure I wrote down anything that occurred to me. Now I’m just hoping that some sort of event will descend on me.

I understand, certain scenes have to have a lot of takes. As an actor, I think it’s quite nice to have a handful of takes, because you don’t want to do it once or twice; I think once or twice sometimes is quite terrifying because you don’t really feel like you’ve given them what you want.

When you take on new roles that you don’t feel comfortable with, that require you having skills you don’t have, it’s terrifying.

Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

The miasma of fear that is created through voter suppression is as much about terrifying people about trying to vote as it is about actually blocking their ability to do so.

Yet there is clearly something about bold, neurodivergent women and girls that prompts powerful men to scrape the sides of their own putrid barrels of opinion to attack this ‘terrifying’ otherness.

I love biographies. I’m especially into stuff about Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s. I find it fascinating and terrifying.

My Aunt Sheila was terrifying! She would put a napkin in her mouth and say, ‘You’ve got something on your face, dear. Let me just scratch that off your face. Let me sand your cheek.’

Gorillas may seem terrifying because of their bodies, but they are really magnificent and very gentle.

It’s true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.

My wife’s brother has a little house on a small island in the Baltic Sea, and we go there at Christmas. The 30-minute crossing from the mainland to this island is the most terrifying cruise you’ll ever take. They give you a barf bag when you walk on board.

Military history is essential to understanding any history and, moreover, is a terrifying and sobering study in the realities of human nature – for yes, to me, such a thing exists, and history indeed proves it.

Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can and surely will at times fail. Other vulnerabilities, like being embarrassed or risking love, can be terrifying, too. I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.

The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.

If incredible creatures like sharks can exist, why not Bigfoot? When I look at sharks, they’re the most terrifying, monstrous, dinosaur-like things. To this day, I’m so fascinated by them and can’t get my head around how they are on Planet Earth at all.

Directing was a great experience, but it’s terrifying to have the responsibility of carving up the other actors’ performances.

I remember doing a shoot for Herb Ritts, hanging off the Eiffel Tower – that wasn’t your usual day at the office. It was terrifying, and in the end, you couldn’t really tell how high I was because the photographer was scared of heights, so he was quite far away from me.

I think fame is such a scary thing, and it’s something I can never understand. It’s terrifying, but it’s the only way I get to do what I love every day, you know?

I am a father, and sometimes I want to stay close to home. By varying the workplace, it gives me space to breathe. I enjoy theatre because it reminds me I’m mortal, and it’s terrifying when it goes wrong but the most thrilling experience when it flies.

I think it’s really terrifying that a country based on the foundations and ideals of God, is now systematically removing God from everything. Everything!

Nature is in austere mood, even terrifying, withal majestically beautiful.

I do think we’re on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don’t know how to talk about it.

Meditation, especially for people who don’t know very much about it and think it’s this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.

I’m intimidated every day I go on the stage and everyday I go on a movie set. It’s terrifying and I always want to reshoot the first day or the first week, I’m so terrified.

I think, for every artist, the second album is the most terrifying one to put out because it can either boost your career, and everybody can’t wait until your third album, or the second one is terrible, and ‘He probably hit a plateau on his first one.’

In September 2008, the overleveraged and undermanaged U.S. banking system suffered a terrifying collapse. And that, in turn, nearly took the whole country down.

Time just gets away from you so quickly. And there’s these moments that will never come around again. And there’s something so terrifying, but also so beautiful about that.

I think characters are most terrifying when they’re relatable. It’s best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That’s when a movie is most terrifying.

Guatemala’s ornate presidential palace, once a terrifying fortress whose every corridor was patrolled by heavily armed soldiers in berets and camouflage uniforms, is now a normal public building where ordinary citizens enter without fear.

I say getting a lecturing from Oprah is probably the most terrifying lecture you could possibly get.

We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.

The very first time I did stand-up, that was terrifying.

When I first thought about leaving the traditional route of a 9-to-5 career to pursue full-time YouTube, it was terrifying – not many people were doing it. The thought was I have to have money saved up, because this very likely might fail. From the start, I had to give it my all for it to work.

A lot of people have found the idea of living your life over and over again absolutely terrifying; there’s some people that find it very comforting. There are others that are appalled by it.

I took several trips to New Orleans and met with people who had intimate knowledge of the underbelly of the city in the 1950s. The meetings were both fascinating and terrifying.

The truth is you only have yourself to offer. And when you come to that realization, it’s terrifying, because you think it’s probably not enough.

I rent houses in LA when I’m filming. I find the isolation there terrifying. There’s nowhere to go, there’s nowhere to be with people. I’m not a beach bunny.

There are many talented and worthy writers engaging horror in new, imaginative, and yes, terrifying ways.

I’ve never had to fend for a child’s life, which sounds very terrifying.

The only thing I find difficult to watch – horror movies – not that I don’t like them. Like ‘The Shining,’ it’s one of my favorite movies, but it’s terrifying. I feel like I’ve watched a marathon afterwards.

There are millions of women all around the world who are in dangerous, terrifying situations. It’s up to us as storytellers to give people hope, to let people know that there is a way out.

In healthcare like in government generally, people are incentivised to engage in wasteful/dangerous signalling to a terrifying degree – not rigorous thinking and not solving problems.

You show a movie to your friends when you’re working on it, but you don’t have any real objectivity. You just don’t know. So that moment when it’s shown for the very first time at Sundance, it’s just terrifying. I’m so anxious. And then every screening is different.

I am from the age of magazines, so the Internet is terrifying to me. But I am learning.

With ‘Cold Skin,’ I believe we can create a lasting psycho-physiological horror film. It is one of the most atmospheric, terrifying, cinematic, and original stories of the human spirit.

Being diagnosed with cancer is terrifying.

Bull riding isn’t that much different than the life of a musician. You’re trying to ride an uncontrollable force, there are no rules or limits or regulations, and there’s a freedom in it that’s also a bit terrifying. You can learn a lot about yourself through some of those scarier moments.

I’m certainly afraid of not being able to write for some reason. I guess I’ve had spells of not necessarily writer’s block, but something like that. I find that pretty terrifying.

Sometimes when you’re stood in front of 100 people, delivering a speech with rage and lots of emotion, that can be utterly terrifying. I find that very scary.

Marriage is actually really terrifying. It doesn’t work for many people.

The Russians invaded Georgia in 2008 and my mum got stuck and had to be airlifted back to the capital by the UN because she’d left her passport at my grandparents. It was absolutely terrifying and it’s why I always carry my passport in my handbag now.

In our town, Halloween was terrifying and thrilling, and there was a whiff of homicide. We’d travel by foot in the dark for miles, collecting candy, watching out for adults who seemed too eager to give us treats.

There’s so much craziness that comes along with being a movie star that you can get so confused. Unless you’ve spent your whole life waiting to be the centre of attention, it’s pretty terrifying.

When you have a smartphone, the things that it can do are kind of ridiculous and terrifying.

What makes ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.

I like to pace myself at about two minutes of music a day. With ‘Waterworld’ it was closer to five minutes a day, which is uncomfortable and slightly terrifying.

The whole experience of doing a sitcom is… Telling jokes with such precision is really exciting, but it’s also terrifying.

My friends never talk to me about my poetry because they’re embarrassed that I write it or they’re embarrassed by what I write about which are not such extraordinarily terrifying things, but they are the state of human existence.

Baffin Island was extraordinary; one of the most terrifying things I’ve done.

If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

I thought that we all were afraid of death, but I’ve talked to my wife and other people, and they’re not afraid of death the way I am. I find that really confusing. I don’t like the idea of nothingness – that’s terrifying to me.

Change is terrifying for people who feel immune to it by virtue of status, divine appointment, or imagined irreplaceability.

Most big popcorn movies are ‘bad guy does something to good guy, good guy gets revenge on bad guy, sets the world right, and moves on.’ And ‘Ender’s Game’ is just not that simple, so it’s an exciting challenge. It’s a little terrifying, and let’s see how audiences respond.

Global warming – utterly disinterested in our political paralysis – worsens at a terrifying pace.

The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.

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.

I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, ‘Huh? What?’

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.

With ‘Black Sea,’ I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario.

My becoming an actor was a massive shift for me, and a terrifying one.

What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.

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.

Empathy is what obsesses me. And watching empathy recede in the world is terrifying.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

It’s successful, middle-class Arab men and women, professionals with seemingly happy family lives, who are prepared to go to paradise for a greater cause. That’s terrifying.

I don’t love horror movies with something surreal happening. That doesn’t work for me. What’s terrifying is something that could actually happen to me and what I would do. I don’t know how to throw a punch, and I’ve never had to do it.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

The world is… often terrifying, disgusting and tragic, but it is also beautiful. I should like to know how exactly each person would make it a tiny bit less disgusting and a tiny bit more beautiful.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting ‘Hiawatha’ and they groan.

Finding out whether I had made the grades for my first choice university course or whether I needed to rethink my future was terrifying.

The biggest thing is to overcommunicate your vision. It’s so important to have real clarity as to what is inside your head, and sometimes that’s really terrifying for people.

I find theater terrifying. There are no do-overs, you know? It’s all happening live. You need to be in it 100 percent at any given moment, and the audience is right there. I’m really intimidated by theater, but it is my first true love. I love theater. I love that anxiety.

Your whole life boils down to a moment that will take 20-40 seconds. How crazy is that? And it’s every four years. I wouldn’t tell myself that during the meet, but it’s terrifying. A lot of it boils down to a very precise moment in the universe, and that just happens to be the Olympics.

If you read Grimm’s fairy tales, they’re absolutely terrifying.

Stalking can have devastating consequences, and I am determined that we do all we can to protect victims from these prolonged and terrifying campaigns of abuse that can last years, leaving many people too afraid to leave their homes and unable to get on with their lives.

For years, my marriage to Prince was mine. The idea of exposing myself to the world… was terrifying.

A vast percentage of the human race is literally not wired neurologically to get irony. Well more than half of humanity takes life at face value, which is to me terrifying.

The thing that strikes a chord with me… as a mother… is to think of my 17-year-old son fighting would be just terrifying.

I really enjoyed being pregnant up until the point when the terrifying pains began.

People say I’m charming, but I’m uneasy with that word. Quentin Crisp said: ‘Charisma is the ability to influence without logic,’ which is terrifying.

The male ego is a terrifying, terrifying thing, you know? If it’s shattered, it becomes even more dangerous.

One-liners that must land perfectly in just the right nanosecond can be terrifying.

There is nothing more terrifying than lying in the ring and feeling that your hand has gone numb.

Sharks are really serious animals. They’ve been around longer than dinosaurs. They’re basically prehistoric killing machines, and that’s terrifying and fascinating, at the same time.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone – and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone – at night. That’s the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it’s also where the title came from for the book.

I put a bushfire out. It was one of the most incredible things, terrifying. We get them a lot in Australia.

I don’t care if you believe in ghosts at all. I challenge you to go spend the night walking the halls of Waverly Hills in Kentucky, which is a terrifying place.

‘Somnia’ is a story about loss and, I guess, what you’re willing to do to have closure and try and feel whole again. It’s a story of redemption in a sense. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s a heartbreaking story that’s incredibly terrifying.

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

I remember walking home one day from school, and this car pulled up behind me really slow, and it gave me a really weird feeling, and all of a sudden it skimmed me, and the man was half naked and tried to pull me into his car and saying crazy things to me. And it was terrifying.

That war has brought with it a truly incredible development of means of destruction and a terrifying prospect of rapid and almost limitless development in that direction.

It’s very difficult when there are pictures taken on the red carpet. I find those things so terrifying that another persona just kicks in. I don’t recognise myself.

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.

The idea of having dreams that don’t come true is really terrifying.

Women are incredible in groups together. Terrifying. Men have nothing on them.

Facebook is terrifying to the traditional games biz.

I guess my favourite Disney film was ‘Snow White,’ which has a really dark moment when the evil queen turns into a witch and makes the poison apple. It was terrifying in the same way ‘Maleficent’ is.

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

My sister and I were driving at night and were followed by guys on a bike. It was a terrifying experience. The ordeal made us start a chauffeur service.

If you look at UFC champions: BJ Penn – terrifying! GSP – terrifying! Anderson Silva – terrifying! But I’m not terrifying.

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.

I tend to be a lot more honest and transparent with employees than most bosses are. But I’ve had people tell me – even those who love working with me – that I’m terrifying, which is hard for me to imagine.

When someone asks if you want to play Brittany Murphy, who you idolized as a child and grew up loving and who you wanted to be, you can’t say no. Even if it’s the most terrifying thing someone asks you to do.

I had a panic attack years ago in preparation for a very difficult show. And you cannot hear, or see, or you can’t compute. It’s quite terrifying.

The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

I know some people whose father has basically spent their whole inheritance on scammers. He’s old; he wants to feel important, like he’s doing business, so he goes to his bank and pays out – it’s terrifying.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

Childhood is all about innocence. Being constantly surrounded by cameras and shutterbugs, makes children lose that innocence. It’s terrifying and worrying, to say the least.

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.

As wild as I was, when the cops show up, and suddenly you’re being handcuffed, it’s so deeply shocking and terrifying, the loss of freedom.

I find doppelgangers terrifying… can you imagine two of me?! Now that’s scary!

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That’s a terrifying situation. That’s contrary to the principles of science.

I know how terrifying L.A. can be, because I’ve been there as a failure. After ‘Drive,’ it was the most marvellous place in the universe.

I don’t have anything against corporate America. I mean, I guess there’s something about living in a capitalist society that can get kind of terrifying at times.

Japanese horror films take the business of being frightening seriously. There is no attempt at postmodernism or humour. They are incredibly melancholy, with a strong emotional core, while remaining absolutely terrifying.

The idea of creating film scores was terrifying for many years, into my 30s. It struck me as a career of doing 30-page term papers the night before they’re due.

The first ATM in Hong Kong was actually at the foot of the bank. I remember my father using it. And I find it absolutely terrifying that – something about the way the machine just kind of coughed up money with no difficulty.

I think I first encountered Ebola from the movie ‘Outbreak.’ Then there was the book ‘The Hot Zone.’ It’s the type of thing you either read and say, ‘Oh wow, that’s terrifying,’ or you read it and say, ‘Oh wow, I want to do that.’ I read it and said, ‘Oh wow, I want do that.’

If I couldn’t move, I don’t know what I would do. That would be terrifying for me; I don’t know how I’d cope with that.

I have to bring to your notice a terrifying reality: with the development of nuclear weapons Man has acquired, for the first time in history, the technical means to destroy the whole of civilization in a single act.

I still miss qualities of Khmer life that are hard to quantify: the slow, sensual pace, the hovering presence of the past, the vast skies filled with terrifying and beautiful butts. And, of course, the food.

I had severe asthma when I was a child and I saw doctors growing up. Seeing someone who could not only help me medically, but also assure me that I was going to be O.K. at this really terrifying time – that’s what I wanted to do.

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.

I never drove in England. I rode bicycles. So driving is terrifying.

If mothers are our first teachers, then having a narcissistic one teaches us that human closeness is terrifying, and the world is a heartless, inconsistent place.

Just thinking about that, if that were to really happen, if an alien were to come down and really abduct you, how terrifying and how earth-shattering would that be? Your whole world is just destroyed. God is destroyed. It’s kind of a fascinating thing to think about.

We all live in fear of cancer, but to be told you have skin cancer was terrifying.

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.

I travel a lot for work and have people waiting outside my hotel or call my room constantly or show up at whatever restaurant I’m eating at because I Snapchatted. It is a little terrifying.

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms, of the mornings that make waking up worthwhile.

Stepping away from Fun. was both exciting and terrifying.

I’ve never SoulCylcled or CrossFit-ed. That sounds terrifying to me!

It’s terrifying, social media. It terrifies me.

We’re 10 or something, and we’re watching ‘Evil Dead,’ which you don’t really see the humor in when you’re 10 years old. It was just terrifying. And same with ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street,’ which is such a brilliant movie and such a brilliant concept.

Believe it or not, my introduction to scary literature was ‘Pinocchio.’ My mother read it to me every day before naptime when I was three or four. The original ‘Pinocchio’ is terrifying.

Losing my anonymity in this world I think is something that I find terrifying.

Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it.

I was famous in a way that was kind of terrifying. I had no protection. When reporters showed up at my house, there wasn’t even a sidewalk. They were literally parked on my front lawn.

I’m a vagabond. I have a suitcase that is ready to go at a moment’s notice. The thought of being in one place for a long time, or playing one character for a long time, is terrifying for me.

The most terrifying thing for most everybody in the whole Western World is to take responsibility for your own life and to experience real freedom.

After so long being thin, it was terrifying being heavier. But I am a naturally curvy Hispanic girl. I don’t deprive myself.

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

Music is so 100 percent for me that the idea of giving that up in any way, shape, or form would be terrifying to me.

Sex isn’t hard, but intimacy is terrifying.

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts – we have learned only recently how close we were to war – but I knew enough to make me tremble.

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.

I’m all about surprises. If you watch a horror movie, and it’s called ‘Kiss Land,’ it’s probably going to be the most terrifying thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

It’s the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.

Life is a very scary thing because it’s unknown. Anything can happen anytime, and that is terrifying for all of us: to not to be in control.

Ted Cruz, if he’s elected president, the first thing he will do is return Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and roll back same-sex marriage laws. Which is law – hello – you can’t really take it away. It’s really terrifying the direction we’re going in now.

When I used to work in television, a tip was rather than looking down the barrel of the camera and imagine people watching, which is terrifying, imagine your most discerning friend observing you, and imagine you’re just talking to them.

You don’t want to do something that’s all terrifying.

It’s not terrifying to watch ‘Mindhunter,’ necessarily, but it’s just unsettling. You can find Aileen Wuornos just talking to a camera. It’s hard to watch. Her eyeballs, they are just terrifying.

Performing was 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.

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.

I’d been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.

I sail to Hawaii and back a lot, and it sometimes involves very terrifying experiences. And you have to keep yourself from becoming panicky.

Stand-up comedy seems like a terrifying thing. Objectively. Before anyone has done it, it seems like one of the most frightening things you could conceive, and there’s just no shortcut – you just have to do it.

I remember thinking this is everything that England means to me. The huge, flat landscapes with deep reds and greens. Daunting and terrifying and incredible. We should see it more on film, I think.

Most single guys I know think fatherhood is terrifying.

At 140, 150, that’s when the car starts floating. At 160, that’s when you start seeing dead relatives. At 180, it’s, like, terrifying and exciting.

Theater has always been terrifying to me.

Honestly, to tell you the truth, being trapped in any video game sounds like a living nightmare to me. In most video games, the point is it’s a fight for survival, so I think it would be a terrifying place to live.

When I did ‘Guffman,’ it was terrifying. I didn’t know what to say. I started talking, and it just came out.

I remember when I was younger, we used to read the Goosebumps books that were absolutely terrifying.

Gorillas are still wild creatures. That’s made very clear when you observe them in nature. They charge and perform other displays that are terrifying by design. But they don’t attack unless they feel threatened.

In my extreme youth I did a terrifying diet – drinking 40 cups of liquid a day.

The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.

I’ve been out of work so many times in my life that relying too much on just one job is terrifying.

Billy is a funny, cheeky, lovely boy and I love being with him. Parenthood is terrifying though. I can barely walk past a building without panicking that it’s going to collapse on his head.

I think in my late 20s, I was starting to enter that realm of complacency, which is the most terrifying place I can imagine as an artist. I felt time creeping up on me.

I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.

I watched the Trade Center buildings go down from my balcony, and it was a terrifying moment. I couldn’t get my mind around it at all.

I had this job where I had to cold call people, and that was terrifying to me, and that was on a far different level than invading their space.

Stand-up comedy is a lot about amplifying emotions and situations; movie acting has a lot to do with mellowing things down and making them subtle. The transition was almost terrifying because of the magnitude of change.

Women were quite terrifying until I was older. I think that’s partly down to confidence.

Some people fascinate me. They really worship at the altar of their careers, you know? And it’s terrifying. It’s sort of like setting a table and waiting for someone to come along and whoosh – push all the plates onto the floor.

In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn’t threaten us.

Losing your job is terrifying, but being prepared makes it so much easier.

The range of weapons at the disposal of military powers is terrifying in its capacity to damage the world and its inhabitants, perhaps even to bring humanity’s long story to its end.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man’s intelligence and his comprehension… would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.

The whole Brexit saga is, in my view, one big, terrifying leap in the dark.

It was both comforting and terrifying to go in to audition for ‘The Girl in the Cafe,’ as I’d worked with everyone in the room on ‘State Of Play.’

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.

I remember my first scene with Alan Rickman, and I was anxious because he is a slight ‘method’ actor; as soon as he is in his cloak, he walks and talks like Snape – it is quite terrifying. But I really wanted to talk to him because ‘Robin Hood’ was one of my favourite films.

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

All of a sudden to get all of this attention, and to be away from home and working all the time was hard. I was on planes all the time. I didn’t see my friends. I cried a lot. It was quite terrifying.

The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me – that, I think, would be terrifying.

I feel like women bond with other women in this nonverbal way, where they take on each other’s gestures. You start dressing more like each other, you eat the same food… It’s a way of expressing regard: I want to be like you. Which is flattering, but if you view it another way, terrifying.

If I actually thought about ‘Fresh Meat’ going on television, I just couldn’t or wouldn’t do it – it’s so terrifying!

I remember thinking, ‘I can’t act.’ Pretending to be someone else is a terrifying thought. The thing was that, along with other people, I could create a whole world. I felt absolutely right directing.

I have two girls and one is now nearly a teenager – it is terrifying.

I want to let all men and women know: Try going to a party or a dinner where you’re completely fine with silences, and you don’t fill them just to fill them. It’s exhilarating and terrifying.

There’s a rumour going ’round that if you amass a certain number of penalty points on your driving licence, the authorities will make you take your test again! Now, if ever there was an incentive to drive carefully, they could not have threatened a more terrifying ordeal.

My most profound growth as a writer came when I joined an online critique group. What a harrowing, terrifying, wonderful experience that was.

We’re in an emergency situation. The United States has become an absolutely terrifying country, and I would hope that I could participate in some way in stopping the horror and the brutality.

It is so important that British children are taught about the World Wars that their great grandparents fought in and lived through. It was a terrifying time.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.

Boys are like puppies, but the thing I find terrifying is how do you steer them?

As a kid, I was terrified. I was a bed wetter, and I had to go to sleepaway camp every summer, which was humiliating and terrifying. I had lots of insecurities and scaredness.

Typically, I would run away from conflict and write about it – that was easier than staying and dealing face-to-face with humans; that’s terrifying for me.

Growing up in a violent home is a terrifying and traumatic experience that can affect every aspect of a child’s life, growth, and development.

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.

I’m not a fighter, but I would love to be a boxer because I love the courage and toughness. I mean, there can be nothing more terrifying than walking into an arena and looking at Mike Tyson in the ring.

America had the message of freedom and democracy, but we haven’t actually shown that to be what we do in the world. So I think that’s a terrifying thing.

Natural disasters are terrifying – that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

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.

This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It’s almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it.

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.

Blackfoot was one of the ultimate live bands… there was no pretense, no gimmickry; it was sound, lights, and rock and roll. Our whole goal was to be terrifying… to strike fear and cause havoc in a closing band’s minds.

As a working actor, all I want to do is work. That’s it. It’s terrifying when you don’t work. It’s very hard when you don’t work. There have been times when I’ve been out of work for like six months. I feel theatre to me is like manna.

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.

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.

There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o’clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death.

The first fight I saw live, the fighter I was shadowing lost in front of a crowd of forty thousand people. The scale of that is staggering to me. Undergoing that overlap between something very personal and something very public strikes me as both admirable and also somewhat terrifying.

If you are fragmented and uncertain, it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt.

I hate heights, that’s the most terrifying thing for me.

The idea of writer’s block or not having inspiration is totally terrifying to me.

It was a quality of my childhood that everything had these two sides. Even though things could be really beautiful and peaceful one moment, they could also be a bit chaotic or maybe terrifying in another.

To perform in front of a room full of people you go to school with would be terrifying. I couldn’t do it now.

Regular panelists on shows can be terrifying. They own that space, and many guest comics suspect they are favoured in the edit, while their own hilarious jokes end up being ejected into the ether.

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.

It’s a terrifying feeling when you have to do multiple takes of a tricky scene because the focus puller cant keep a sharp image.

The more we can personalise, the more the market can fragment, because of all the availability that streaming presents. Things become old sooner. That’s terrifying.

I love the stage. It’s terrifying in a way that film and television is not. When you’re about to go out, and you’re adrenaline just gets out of control, and that can be really daunting.

If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I’m still frightened of him. I think he’s going to hit me.

It’s terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of ‘A Brief History of Time’ to buy a copy of ‘Genome’.

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.’

‘Dogfight’ was everything wonderful and terrifying about a show, and I feel it 1,000% gave me the knowledge and the confidence that I could do this. I can step up and be present enough to command scenes with amazing actors.