Quotes About Perfection

When I was 10, we drove to Disney World. When we arrived, what impressed me most was the meticulous attention to detail; there wasn't a gum wrapper anyplace.

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it's about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.

It's hard to explain, but it's a beautiful thing to watch in wrestling when someone loses in the exact perfect way.

I remember seeing some little wrinkles in my early 30s and thinking they were interesting. But you know the horror of it is that the screen image has to be perfect.

We all get given these bodies, and they're all fascinating and different... I wouldn't want to be without the wrinkles.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

I used to think that most published writers, the ones I admired, had a muse, or a special connection to the universe, to nature, or to aliens - something inaccessible to me that caused their prose to flow onto the page, already perfect.

Nowadays, everyone writes a cookbook. Models, singers, whatever, everybody thinks that they can do it and cook on TV. What they don't understand is that if you want to do it well, you need to put in the hours.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.

I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

After all, what kind of a life is it that is not pestered by insects? A perfect one, and since life is not perfect, this cannot be life.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, "New England Reformers

I was comforted by the words of my model Benjamin Franklin, who reflected of his own chart: On the whole, though I never arrived at perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man that I otherwise should have been had I not attempted it.

Progress, not perfection, is the goal. I'm a gold-star junkie

Perfection may be an impossible goal, but habits help us to do better. Making headway toward a good habit, doing better than before, saves us from facing the end of another year with the mournful wish, once again, that we'd done things differently.