Quotes About Perfectionism

Artists are neurotic and hypersensitive, and they tend to focus on granular details, sometimes at the expense of the big picture. I've gotten better at the big picture over the years.

When you're a nerd, you know there's a million types of neurotic self-loathing.

My daughters have become little judges. If I do produce a baked item, they tut at the soggy bottom and advise me to try harder next time.

It can be a bit sententious in the Nigerian household, to the point where you feel like with any wrong step you've set yourself back so far. It's like everything has to be done right.

I'm so hard on myself that when I'm in the studio, I'll write 10 songs and only use one. So those nine songs that are left over, I always think, 'Where could these go? Who could they be for?'

Being in TV, we get to do it again and again until it's 'right.' There's a part of me that likes the other way, that aspect of theatre where there's no chance to go back.

I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well.

I'll admit it: I'm a control freak. I am. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it 110% or there's no point in doing it at all, especially if the work takes me away from time with my husband and children.

There are some great songs - like, I really like 'Snowcone' and 'Whelk Then' and 'No Problem.' I think I'm dissatisfied that it's not written from start to finish; it's over a year's worth of work that doesn't correlate.

All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three and if I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again, even if it took hours.

but it doesn't begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.

My greatest fear has always been to make a mistake.' 'Perhaps your greatest fear is your greatest mistake.

beautifully wrapped. She reached for her tape, pulled the end—and got the sliver left on the roll.

The moment the world declares a person to be immortal, at that moment the person will strive to prove the world wrong. In the face of glowing press releases and reviews the most heralded women starve themselves or cut themselves or poison themselves. Or they find a man who's happy to do that for him.

I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything... Nothing was ever good enough, my mom says, so here at the end of my life, I'm left with nothing.

Still, the better she could draw, the worse her life got--until nothing in her real world was good enough. It got until she didn't belong anywhere. It got so nobody was good enough, refined enough, real enough. Not the boys in high school. Not the other girls. Nothing was real as her imagined world.

The slogan for America is 'Not Good Enough'. Nothing's ever fast enough. Nothing's big enough. We're never satisfied. We're always improving…

Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better.

P]erfectionism is one of the typical hindrances on the way toward perfection.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

There are times when I'm driving home after a day's shooting, thinking to myself, That scene would've been so much better if I had written it out.

I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced had no existence.

John Jarndyce] rubbed his head so constantly that not a single hair upon it ever rested in its right place

The only thing wrong with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished.