Quotes About Feedback

I'd had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed 'The End' at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

To be honest, there are so many things I learned in acting school beyond the method; it was a safe place to practice. So acting school was about exercising that acting muscle and doing it every single day - and having people tell you that you're bad every single day! Which pushes you to work even harder.

Everybody's so scared to be honest with one another. If you didn't like the way I handled myself in practice, one of the players, come up to me. Somebody say something - anybody. I'm not gonna take it as offense; it's not personal.

The way I toe the line with comedy is I run jokes past people.

Stand-up keeps you on your toes because it's instant. With TV and movies, you have to wait for the numbers to come in to see what happened at the box office. With stand-up, it's right there, that night, in your face.

If it's constructive criticism, please, go ahead. I'm all up for, 'Hey, your toes were not pointed.' Like, I can see that.

Public figures will get public criticism, and they should be tolerant enough to take it.

There are times when I'll send a manuscript to an editor, and I'll think it is the most likely project I've ever sent them. And they might call me the next morning and say they couldn't tolerate it. That happens so frequently that I've given up any expectation of knowing what anybody's going to like.

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you'll finish in time to send a new version by morning.

I annotated my friend's book manuscript with scribbles on every page. She annotated mine with a single note: This needs to be better . She trusted that I would know what to do, and I did.

If I don't read at least one bad thing about myself every day I take a long look at my behaviour and try harder to be shocking.

It's a common weakness among creatives, whether a designer, a writer, or a programmer, to be shy about showing unfinished work.

Depending on anecdotal reports from users was a poor system. It'd be like running a restaurant where you waited for customers to complain about the food instead of tasting it ourselves before it left the kitchen.

For every awkward debate on a P2, there was often a private Skype chat where it was resolved. Matt set good examples for praising in public and critiquing in private.

It's easier to get feedback and make adjustments with how a team works if you're in the same room. Feedback is hard to come by in life at all.

four big personal questions I asked everyone in e-mail once a month: What's going well? What's not? What do you want me to do more of? What do you want me to do less of?

If you want to write a negative review, don't tickle me gently with your aesthetic displeasure about my work. Unleash the goddamn Kraken.

You must be true to yourself—however, if you have a dozen editors tell you that something is a cliché, trite, or overdone, it probably is, and you need to step back and take a look at your work.

I spend a lot of time talking to young and emerging producers on Twitter, feeding back thoughts and encouraging them.

In my job, people tell you that all the time: 'This shoot was great. You look amazing.' But you never know what they say when you turn away.

You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.

For me, the audience is the most important thing in the whole chain, so finding out how they respond to things is a learning curve at all times.