Quotes About Perfectionism

John Cleese... he cannot sing and keeps a locked piano in his room to prove it.

We don't think of ourselves as being perfectionists, really. To us it's more about desperately trying to have it sound more or less OK.

I was real good at music and real bad at everything else.

I'm all about doing things myself because I find it hard to trust other people. Not trust, but I know exactly what I want to do, and I know exactly how it's supposed to look.

I can't get excited by my own music. It's impossible.

Expectations are an evil thing.

I tend to write and record things quite quickly. You can tamper with things for years, and it's artistic laziness sometimes.

I'm a bad artist. I'm lazy and untalented and bad.

I'm learning to let go of the idea of trying to be perfect.

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

I'm just a manga artist, so I can't stand being scrutinized.

I don't like the sound of all those lists he's making – it's like taking too many notes at school; you feel you've achieved something when you haven't.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we're perfect.

The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we're perfect.

The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we're perfect.

And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.

There's never enough time to do it right, But always enough time to do it over.

the old lament he had heard from the first enlisted sailors he had commanded. Why is there never enough time to do it right but always enough time to do it over?

That's what happens nowadays with people working on computers. They can so easily fix things with their mouse and take out all the, 'Oh, somebody coughed in the background we need to take that out' - or somebody hit a bad note. Those are all the best moments.

For one thing, it is hard for me to let a sentence stand if I see something wrong with it. Even when I'm writing a grocery list it is hard for me not to correct a misspelling.

But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than an actual statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve.

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word "Book's" with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.