Quotes About Perfectionism

Perfectionism kills art. I find that if I criticise myself, it spoils the fun. You can get paralysed by analysis - it takes all the playfulness away.

The noblest works of human art and pride show that their makers were not satisfied.

You go in and record and sing them some and you go back in and rerecord and sing them some more. That's kind of how I did this album [The Art of Elegance].

If you wish to make good art, then you must believe you already do. Otherwise, you will never be good enough.

One who enjoys finding errors will then start creating errors to find.

or-Nothing Thinking. You look at things in absolute, black-or-white categories, as if shades of gray do not exist, and you think of yourself as either a complete success or total failure. This dichotomous way of thinking can make life pretty miserable and make you feel like a zero, or nothing, most of the time. In addition, you can't accurately describe yourself or the world in black-or-white categories. Things are rarely totally horrible or absolutely perfect.

Self-Directed Shouldslead to feelings of guilt and inferiority when we don't live up to our self-imposed standards ("I shouldn't have screwed up!").

Hidden Shoulds are not expressed explicitly with terms like should, ought, or must, but they're implied by your negative thoughts and feelings. For example, if you berate yourself whenever you make a mistake, you're essentially telling yourself that you should be perfect and should never goof up.

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

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Knowing themselves to be faultless, they make it their mission to detect the myriad faults in others, against which they wage incessant tongue.

You think the world begins and ends with you and your perfect little family and your perfect little life and you think stress is finding the perfectly color-coordinated cushions for your new $10,000 sofa.

Sometimes they purposely asked people over just to give themselves the incentive to clean up in a frantic rush before they arrived. But

It was annoying that the better stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it.

Average wasn't good enough. Average was too big. Everyone knew that. There was an obesity crisis in this country! She didn't want to fat-shame other people, but she certainly wanted to fat-shame herself because she deserved to be shamed.

I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.

But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

Me, I'm a stickler. I prefer my photographs in focus.

I want to focus on each scene. I'm a real perfectionist, and I don't want to feel like I didn't consider every possible variation of a scene. I come from a theater background, so I'm used to a lot of repetition, and I'm used to really attacking something over and over and over again.

After every movie, I always kick myself for the same things-didn't do enough, not enough variation, not enough interesting choices, too bland.

Every time I hear a recording I've made, I hear all kinds of things I could improve or things I should have done. There's always so much more to be done in music. It's so vast.

I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.

Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song.