Quotes About Perfectionism

If you wrote a crummy line or maybe didn't sing to the best of your ability, there's layers of 10 different instruments all working to convey something. In writing prose for the memoir, if it's not working, it's just not working. It's harder to figure out how to fix it.

I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

know, Mother. Doesn't everybody clean their venetian blinds with a Q-tip twice a day? Duh!

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.

I'm kind of fascist with myself, you know.

I am a fashion designer, so I guess that makes me an overpacker.

I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

When I see myself on screen, I am always looking at the bad bits and finding fault in something or the other.

I could find faults with all my albums because that's just a part of being an artist - it's hard being a human being, isn't it?

I hate watching my own work... I find a lot of faults.

I can't remember who said, 'No film is completed, just abandoned,' but I think most filmmakers will tell you that they could endlessly fiddle with their films for the next couple of decades, you know, changing things, altering things.

I put way too much pressure on myself and put too much into CrossFit. It had become who I was. That's really when I figured out I don't want my identity to be CrossFit.

I don't just like fillers, and I never put a filler on a record. I mean, I want every song on every album that I do to be a potential single.

Whenever you make a movie, when it's done, as a filmmaker, you never sit there and say, 'Boy, I really got that right.' It's, 'Where did I screw up?'

We kept my middle schooler home from school for three days before we turned in our final draft because she was so mean and so brutal at editing out all the cheesy bits. She would roll her eyes and make fun of us, and it was what we needed.

Well, once we finish something, I can't really listen to it because all I hear are problems.

I never show anything to anybody until I've finished it.

A lot of films come out before they're finished.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Once I finish a film, I don't ever see it again. Never ever. I have never seen any of my films since I finished them.

Sometimes I'll do something when I'm tired at night, and it'll sound hot. But in the morning, when I'm wide awake, I'll listen again and think it's way off. Nobody else would notice it, but I'm like, I've got to fix that!

The biggest challenge for me has been in coping with my perfectionism. I have a stiflingly hard time moving forward in a project if it's not 'just right' all along the way. The trap I so easily fall into is rewriting and rewriting the same scenes over and over to make them perfect, instead of continuing on into the wild unknown of the story.

There is no middle ground in Hollywood; you're a failure or you're a success. That mentality is wild.