Quotes About Perfectionism

It is really hard for me to impress myself with the work that I do.

I'm a big self-critic and I know there is room for improvement.

Improving, for me, is quite natural as I'm always critical of myself.

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.

I am doomed to an eternity of compulsive work. No set goal achieved satisfies. Success only breeds a new goal. The golden apple devoured has seeds. It is endless.

The fear of making mistakes and not doing a particular ministry well has paralyzed many believers, and that is a tragedy. They fail to see that perfectionism is religion (form without power). Excellence is Kingdom. Saying yes to the King is the first step in discipleship. And being driven by love makes it impossible to remain stationary.

I always make things worse than they are or create problems that aren't there. And going and doing some simple task becomes a problem. I start imagining problems that aren't there. What people are going to think, who's going to judge me and am I going to be good enough? Am I worthy?

There's no need to put a dumb picture of us on the album cover. We always look at ourselves and think, 'Wow, we look like idiots.' We'd rather have a piece of art on there.

I hate watching myself on video. I don't ever do it. I'm just too hard on myself, and I always go away feeling like, Wow, I've got a ton to work on.

I realized that if I were a 23-year-old girl getting married, and I wasn't struggling with it, that would likely mean that something was either massively wrong with me or that my brain is made up of delicately wrapped almonds that serve perfectly as party favors.

As good as I was at wrestling, I never thought I was any good.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I didn't want to be like the novelist who spent so much time rewriting his first sentence that he never wrote his second.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Happy are they whose pens fly across the page; I myself hesitate, I falter. I become angry and fearful. My drive diminishes as my taste improves. I brood more over an ill-suited word than I rejoice over a well proportioned paragraph.

Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert complains in a letter to Colet, "What a bitch of a thing prose is! It's never finished; there's always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

Gustave Flaubert

I used to come home at night full of inspiration, and sit up with a bottle of Scotch. As I wrote, the words seemed wonderful, just too wonderful to be coming from me. Next morning I always found they were terrible and I could never use anything I wrote.

I'm afraid of making a mistake. I'm not totally neurotic, but I'm pretty neurotic about it. I'm as close to totally neurotic as you can get without being totally neurotic.