Quotes About Perfectionism

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

I'm surprised when the ball doesn't go into the hoop. I think I should make every shot.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Their grumpiness is often the grumpiness of perfectionists who hold that anything less than total victory is failure, a premise that makes it easy to give up at the start or to disparage the victories that are possible. This is Earth. It will never be heaven. There will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction.

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough.

Life isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nothing is ever good enough the way it is.

The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results. The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain.

Most of us are really willing only to write well, and this is why the act of writing strains us.

To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.

Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

You may call it having standards. What you should be calling it is perfectionism.

Perfectionism is fear in a fancy dress.

What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

something, what we mean is that we won't do something unless we can guarantee that we'll do it perfectly. Working artists know the folly of

ÄŒím je ?lovÄ›k nedokonalejÅ¡í, tím pÃ…â"¢ísnÄ›jÅ¡ím kritikem má tendence se stát.

Perhaps it would be better to say that, rather than losing their passion, they had frozen it by over-idealizing it.

I'm never content with what I do. I live in a sort of permanent dissatisfaction. I think that's the secret to doing things well.

I stopped listening to Justin. I don't think he likes to leave anything as nature intended. He'd iron out the lump on a camel's back and get a pelican to have its throat lifted.

As a man I am flawed, but my music is perfect.

I have an over-attachment to precision, which is why I've sold more magazines than any man alive.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

Why'd you have to say that there's always someone who can do it better than I can And don't you think that I know that walkin' on water won't make me a miracle man

The man who will neither play nor do business unless everything is just to his liking and notions, retards rather than contributes to progress.

He is a man whom it is impossible to please, because he is never pleased with himself.