The 'public' scares me but people I trust.

You wanna know what scares people? Success. When you don't make moves and when you don't climb up the ladder everybody loves you because you're not competition.

It scares you: all the noise the rattling the shaking. But the look on everybody's face when you're finished and packing it's the best smile in the world and there's nobody hurt and the well's under control.

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.

The physical part of comedy is as hard as a lot of action movies. It scares me but in a way that I like.

It doesn't matter that Bush scares the hell out of me. What matters is that he scares the hell out of a lot of very important people in Washington who can't speak out in the military in the intelligence community.

I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens I hope I die quickly.

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear but not that thing.

I've never dreamed of being famous. The idea of it really scares me.

Dying is easy it's living that scares me to death.