Quotes About Self-criticism

I hate watching me. I hate watching me. It just makes me feel awful. I think, 'I look stupid from that angle. I wish I didn't let them put that shirt on me.'

Sometimes I only succeed in beating myself to death.

And anyway, no one ever develops and achieves self-awareness in a vacuum, beyond all eras and systems. The period you grow up in and mature in always influence your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or evil.

People with BPD judge themselves harshly all the time and find judgments lurking around the corner of every raised eyebrow, sneeze, yawn, or shoulder shrug. You must be acutely aware of how your responses can be misconstrued as judgments.

I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.

I am my own biggest critic ... I'm constantly criticizing myself, constantly trying to find ways to better myself and ... compete and, you know, just be the best.

I know that I am my worst critic. I know that if I can walk away from the set at the end of the day and feel that I did the best job I could and feel proud, that's what will satisfy me.

There's a bunch of people who sit around and make excuses for themselves and get upset with artists, but you already know what this is - it's an ego-driven business.

Laughter deriding others is only too often incense one burns at one's own self-constructed altar, an altar one knows to be rickety.

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing. Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on.

you say you do not see it. you say I am too hard on myself. but I have lived with myself for too many years. I know exactly how hard I am.

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

Because I am both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, 'That was so bad,' is always followed by 'And there was so little of it!

He pampered himself with the somewhat whimsical pleasure of sneering at himself through his work, and it may well have been from such a pleasure that his sad little dream world sprang.

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

Ive definitely got a sense of not being very good at stuff. Its sort of absurd because, you know, Ive done really quite well for myself, but I still really doubt myself. Its just the way I am.

People often ask whether I consider myself successful. I don't yet, because there's so much more I want to accomplish. I put more pressure on myself than anyone else can.

I think I beat myself up more than anyone else.

It's not possible to be perfect - you can always do something better. I'm never proud of what I've done. Sometimes, I'm not ashamed.

The handsome things she had admired from her youth up she suddenly suspected of age and absurdity. In short, she felt that fear which takes possession of nearly all authors when they read over a work they have hitherto thought proof against every exacting or blase critic: new situations seem timeworn; the best-turned and most highly polished phrases limp and squint; metaphors and images grin or contradict each other; whatsoever is false strikes the eye.

I don't have a single complete show or movie or anything else that I could look at and say, 'Nailed that one.' But endless dissatisfaction is, I suppose, what gets us out of bed in the morning.

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.