Quotes About Perfectionism

I'll bet they think they can leave you alone because you've really got it together. But maybe sometimes you don't really have it together.

No matter how much I scream at them to make my toast as crispy as possible, I have never once gotten it the way I want it. I can't imagine why. What with Japanese industriousness and high-tech culture and the market principles that the Denny's chain is always pursuing, it shouldn't be that hard to get crispy toast, don't you think? So, why can't they do it? Of what value is a civilization that can't toast a piece of bread as ordered?

There's one thing I know for sure: When I'm most opinionated, my writing sucks.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

I am always in self-doubt... every moment of my filmmaking. I am supremely confident when the story is being written and everything is in our head. But the moment we get into the filmmaking, I start doubting myself - from the camera angle to the re-recording to getting the actors to do their shots.

Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.

Even when I use a word in the wrong order in a sentence, I get mad. It's very stressful.

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

For me, taking photographs is such a tortured process. I'm always feeling like I'm not getting enough: I'm in the wrong place, the light isn't good, the subject's not comfortable.

I'm the type of bloke who gets a flatpack cabinet from Ikea, puts it together without reading the instructions, then gets the drill out because the holes are in the wrong place.

I don't like to watch my work after I do it because it just - I'll always look at the wrong things.

I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.

My mind still runs too fast. If we get the wrong fabric or something is stitched the wrong way, I get so angry and so flummoxed that I start spelling my words, just to slow myself down.

Perfectionist is sometimes the wrong word... It means like you're never satisfied, or you're upset by every single failure - any type of failure. And so for me, I don't look at failure as necessarily a bad thing as long as I'm able to learn from it and take something from it, so that next time I'm in that situation I know how to succeed.

You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.

No one leaves the edit room thinking, 'Yeah, I nailed that one!' Everyone I know goes into their first premiere or their first screening thinking, 'I screwed up so bad. I'm sorry, I messed up.' It's just a real common feeling.

I would consider myself a perfectionist, yeah. I don't think that is always that helpful, either. Sometimes it's good to be a little more open-minded; you can overthink things when things are actually fine, and it's that moment that you lose it. Looking back, sometimes I've made mistakes from being a perfectionist.

People say, 'Wow, you've achieved it all this year: two world championship wins and an Olympic gold medal.' And I think, 'Yeah, but how come I feel so unsatisfied and under pressure all over again?'

'Mrs. Doubtfire' is still a fun movie, and it's still fun to watch, but it is hard to watch myself sometimes. I get very critical. And people will say, 'Mara, you were five.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, but I still should have known better!' I'm a lifelong perfectionist, what can I say?

I never let on I was a comedian. I never acted out. It was really important to me, like, to not be Patch Adams. I was so super serious as a doctor, I would bark orders to my nurses. I was hard-core. I wanted to make sure I did my job right. I was perfectly trained to be a physician. You know, it wasn't a fluke. I worked hard at it.

There's really no way to be perfect. Perfectionism is a silly trait to have, so in a lot of ways that inspired the world of 'Divergent,' in which everyone is striving toward that ideal and falling short of it.

The traits I picked from my conversation with Captain Gopinath was his honesty. He was completely possessed at each stage by what he was doing. When he was in the army, he was possessed there. He was possessed when he started Udupi hotel or while doing agriculture. He is a perfectionist and he is very impatient.

My personality, when tasked with creating meals, goes something like this: Is there a way we can make this more difficult? Because let's do that. I don't mean to complicate things. It's just - why buy pre-packaged potato salad when you can spend your morning boiling potatoes and flipping out because there's no dill in the house?

It's usually rooted either in a belief that other people matter more than you do – that's the people-pleasing part of it – or there could also be an element of perfectionism, the over-achiever's Achilles heel: you can't think well of yourself unless you're over-achieving, so you take on too much, try to do it all perfectly and wear yourself out .