Quotes About Perfectionism

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.

The amateur is often unkind or insensitive to others, but she saves her most exquisite cruelty for herself.

amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him.

clients you'd swear up and down were total, unmitigated slobs, but they're actually the opposite—so hell-bent on 'clean and tidy,' they can't even start. Rather than fail, they give up. Their standards are so high, they're overwhelmed before they start. To them, it's better not even tackling the job.

Paul's stepfather had implanted in Paul the need to be perfect—Perfectionism. Paul's fear of failing to do things perfectly led him to postpone doing them—Procrastination. But the more Paul put things off, the more they overwhelmed him, and his snowballing fears eventually prevented him from doing anything at all—Paralysis.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

Ruth puts in all the tiddley bits and the expression and doesn't mind how many wrong notes she strikes, but with Jane it is accuracy or nothing. I don't know which Chopin would have hated more," Eleanor said, folding bread and butter into a thickness that would match her appetite.

some of the brightest kids prove to be the most vulnerable to becoming helpless, because they feel the need to live up to and maintain a perfectionist image that is easily and inevitably shattered.

You're the one who can do no wrong." "I do plenty wrong." "You don't have to tell me.

she could not bear to let someone else perform a task when she could do it better herself.

I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good.

I just have this inner insecurity that I'm never good enough.

I am less instinctive as I try to be more professional - about the music, about the sound.

I never felt that I had the natural intellectual gifts that the people who graduate first in their class from Harvard Law had.

My self-editing process is intense.

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

Se foutre la paix ne consiste donc pas du tout à se négliger, mais à accepter la complexité et la nuance du monde. C'est accepter les intempéries qu'un perfectionniste vit comme une attaque. C'est arrêter de s'autoévaluer et de s'autovérifier en permanence.

Perfect Melancholies have high standards they do everything to perfection, but when they impose their standards on others, this trait becomes a weakness.

Some people mention the mistakes of others not to learn from them, but to claim they are perfect.

The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.

In a weird kind of way, music has afforded me an idealism and perfectionism that I could never attain as me.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist, it turns out. Who knew?

Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.

She had trouble simply enjoying and letting be. She liked to correct and make right.