Quotes About Self-criticism

Needing to have things perfect is the surest way to immobilize yourself with frustration.

I have this horrible, horrible habit of going on YouTube and checking out comments about what I do.

Most actors hate watching their own films because all you can see is the glaring mistakes, your own tricks and ticks.

In the past, I put too much pressure on myself. I went out there and I tried so hard to get the ball in the hole, I tried so hard to hit the perfect shots.

I think Bridge Over Troubled Water was a very good song. Artie sang it beautifully. The Boxer was a really nice record. But I don't think I've written any great songs.

I'm a terrible drummer; I almost cannot play the guitar nor sax nor trumpet.

It makes me very hard on myself when I don't achieve the goals I want to achieve. But I feel like that's what makes me as good as I am at times - I push myself to be better, constantly.

Every time before a collection, I say, "I don't want it to come out. I want to cancel it. It's not good. I haven't achieved anything."

I'm definitely not very insecure, but I have perfectionist tendencies, and I'll want things to be a certain way.

I'm my own worst critic and harshest critic and I just want to put honest music out there.

Sometimes I even amaze myself, and sometimes I do things that make me want to punch myself in the face.

The truth is, if you like long hours in solitude, emotional turmoil, constant self-criticism, and bouts of heartrending disappointment, you'll make a good writer. And if you can actually tell an engaging story, you might just make a great one.

I analyse everything I do and when I see something I don't like I try to find the solution and that's why I'm so hard on myself.

She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if beautiful, her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay Coming Apart investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine foolishly decides that she is not beautiful.

what I saw as the negative effect on women's minds of such mundane "tracking" activities as calorie counting, I had sensed that the reason so many tasks women are expected to do in society involve this kind of thinking (e.g. scanning, list making, judging themselves critically, "measuring up") had something to do with the suppressive effect this kind of thinking has on other, bolder kinds of intellectual or emotional leaps.

She was afraid to be alone. She didn't know what to do; she couldn't spend another moment thinking about this, beating herself up about it, but she didn't feel it was right not to either.

She knew she was deliberately finding flaw with everything about herself, and finding very little to celebrate. She second-guessed everything she said and did.

that gloomy kind of mood where you remember all of your mistakes and none of your good decisions

I've never been happy with the quality of my work. I always felt as though my musicianship was lacking and that I should have worked harder at it when I was younger. As I sang and sang, I improved.

Melissa and I both say we don't write very good jokes.

I always have the same thing - which is the fear of not getting a laugh - that I've had from the time I was a kid; obsessing over, 'This joke doesn't quite work, we've got to get this right.' I was always like that, whether I was a member of a six-person ensemble or whether I'm the center of a show.

I put the most pressure on myself. I'm so critical and I think that's a hard mentality to live with. You're not really satisfied with anything you do.

When we went to see the first rough cuts of 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,' I fell to the floor because my acting was so bad. I wrote music to compensate for my bad acting.

I'm never happy about anything, playing-wise. I always think there's things I messed up on, things I should've done differently that could've, A, made us win, or B, made the win easier.