Quotes About Self-criticism

Writers who do crap work believe they have turned in spun gold and all their little darlings must be defended.

Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can't take their own side in an argument.

I am only satisfied insofar as I feel 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' is a definite progress, but even about this picture I am not quite satisfied. There is still too much of the old in it.

I get friends that ask that all the time, and I remember my mother asking me a couple of times, because there was no action during a game, 'did you play?' It's so weird. Everybody's like, 'Great game, great game.' And because I demand so much of myself, I'm like, 'Well, I didn't do that great, because I didn't have any stats.'

I can be very critical on myself and on other people; I can be very demanding.

I can be very hard on myself, very demanding.

I wasn't the kind of guy who was like 'here's my demo,' or 'listen to my demo.' I just never thought it was that good.

When I'm working on something, if I went to an exhibition of an artist I respect, then I usually come home quite depressed and look at what I'm doing and throw it all away and start again.

You can't beat yourself up over being depressed. Because then you're not only depressed, but you're also beating yourself up about it and only compounding the problem.

When I look at my earlier work, I often wonder why I acted like that, why I wore that dress, why I said that dialogue... Why couldn't I do it better? I realized I was too young then and not confident.

I'm pretty critical of myself as far as reaching some sort of perfect bull's-eye or target that I'm aiming for.

It's not even the other kids, because fuck them. It's me. My anxiety. I do this thing after I'm around people where I obsessively overanalyze every interaction to see where I went wrong or who I offended.

Perfectionism was my enemy now.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.

But Masters inevitably possess another quality that complicates the work process: They are not easily satisfied by what they are doing. While able to feel excitement, they also feel doubt about the worthiness of their work. They have high internal standards. As they progress, they begin to detect flaws and difficulties in their original idea that they had not foreseen.

Don't be reviling yourself. None of us is such fine judges of what to do.

I'm very judgmental person. It's one of my faults.

The equanimity with regard to my handwriting vanishes when I look at the corrections I make to a script...here my handwriting is big, childish, clumsy with no evidence of character and purpose... mine reverts to the all-over-the-place stuff I used to write while I was in the army and before I got to University... why I've no idea. But it is so.

You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.

The excitement of creating is followed by desperate self-doubt. Courage and inspiration compete with discouragement and despair.

Self-criticism sessions were held, but these produced more criticism than could usefully be absorbed or accomodated.

Happy are those who find fault with themselves instead of finding fault with others.

I am a total loser, in every aspect of my life. I rarely go out.