For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.

I love human beings. Nevertheless I fear human beings.

I actually am not the best in front of an audience. I have severe stage fright. So I had to confront that. And in public speaking, I always get extremely nervous before any speech that I have to do, and that has not dissipated at all. And so I had to embrace the fact that I will likely always have stage fright.

Having said that, I must now admit that I was still afraid of human beings, and before I could meet even the customers in the bar I had to fortify myself by gulping down a glass of liquor. The desire to see frightening things—that was what drew me every night to the bar where, like the child who squeezes his pet all the harder when he actually fears it a little, I proclaimed to the customers standing at the bar my drunken, bungling theories of art.

It will be clear that the very expression of this fear is a part of becoming what he is. Instead of simply being a façade, as if it were himself, he is coming closer to being himself, namely a frightened person hiding behind a façade because he regards himself as too awful to be seen.

"Aren't you frightened?"
Somehow I expected her to say no, to say something wise like a grownup would, or to explain that we can't presume to understand the Lord's plan.
She looked away. "Yes," she finally said, "I'm frightened all the time."
"Then why don't you act like it?"
"I do. I just do it in private."
"Because you don't trust me?"
"No," she said, "because I know you're frightened, too."

My greatest fear is giving performances. I feel I am responsible for the audience BUT I am also scared of them.

Even after I had determined that there was no physiological cause, and that I was no more insane than most of my fellow men, the fears persisted. It was a defect, illness, or deformity that had to be hidden from "normal" people.

I had to act with the utmost circumspection to save myself from the suspicion of insanity. My memory of the Law, of the two dead sailors, of the ambuscades of the darkness, of the body in the canebrake, haunted me; and, unnatural as it seems, with my return to mankind came, instead of that confidence and sympathy I had expected, a strange enhancement of the uncertainty and dread I had experienced during my stay upon the island. No one would believe me; I was almost as queer to men as I had been to the Beast People. I may have caught something of the natural wildness of my companions. They say that terror is a disease, and anyhow I can witness that for several years now a restless fear has dwelt in my mind, such a restless fear as a half-tamed lion cub may feel.

My greatest fear in life is to be ordinary and I have realized that the people we see as extraordinary people have one thing in common; they take risks and do things unconventionally. They make decisions most people may be scared or indecisive about.

Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

I used to be scared of fame.

I now see, was the fact that there were so many areas of my emotional life where I was muddled and unresolved and therefore ripe for horrendous embarrassment that I was pointlessly guarded about everything. The lurking fear that I might accidentally give away something I did not want to reveal resulted in blanket self-censorship.

I sat and cursed myself. Why did I always appear so dumb when I was called upon to perform something in a crowd? I knew how to write as well as any pupil in the classroom, and no doubt I could read better than any of them, and I could talk fluently and expressively when I was sure of myself. Then why did strange faces make me freeze? I sat with my ears and neck burning, hearing the pupils whisper about me, hating myself, hating them; I sat still as stone and a storm of emotion surged through me