#Perfectionism Quotes

“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

“When workmen strive to do better than well, they do confound their skill in covetousness.”

“The man who never makes a mistake must get tired of doing nothing.”

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

“What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed.”

“I like my raps but I'm never too happy with some of 'em because I feel like they could be better. But every time I hear my flow on that song I wow myself.”

“When I came home and showed my mother my report card with a mark of 98 in arithmetic, she wanted to know who had gotten the other two points.”

“I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.”

“Perfectionism is really a manifestation of the belief that one's efforts are never good enough. Imagine: How many of the obstacles standing in your way are the product of your own imagination? What have you convinced yourself that you can't do? What limitations have you come to believe in? Your mind is very powerful and effective. Is it working for you, or against you?”

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

“I don't very often think I've done a good job. I don't like the majority of what I do. I shouldn't say I don't like it, but I'm not satisfied with almost everything that I do.”

“When asked how she knows when her writing is where she wants it to be: "I know when it's the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it's the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, 'No. No, I'm finished. Bye.' And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won't do that."”

“Don't worry about getting it right. Just get it started.”

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

“I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.”

“I think my vice would be outdoing myself.”

“Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.”

“I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.”

“Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.”

“Successful people don’t wait for everything to be perfect to move forward.”

“You know you’re writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.”

“The first draft of anything is sh*t.”

“The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child.”

“I don't know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.”

“No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.”

“I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained, or the sofa faded.”

“Of all the albums I've made, I still don't feel like I've made the perfect album. I've had ones that touch on this, and others that touch on that, but never one that's just perfect and fully relevant. I don't know if I'll ever make it, but I'm certainly trying every day.”

“When I do something I have to do it all the way - that goes for music, with a high-hat, a snare drum, a rhyme, everything. I have to push it to the extreme. That's how I realized I have addictive behavior. Somebody told me this once, that the thing that makes me bad is the same thing that makes me good at other things.”

“I always see what’s... wrong. Would you want that? When I see a car or a rocket or spacecraft, I only see what’s wrong. I never see what’s right. It’s not a recipe for happiness.”

“Other than obvious errors like forgetting a line, often I can't see any difference between take one and take 20.”

“I met another man who considered himself perfect, but he was thoroughly mad; and I do not believe that any of the pretenders to perfection are better than good maniacs... for while a man has got a spark of reason left in him, he cannot, unless he is the most impudent of impostors, talk about being perfect.”

“I don't want to do anything halfway. It has to be perfect.”

“There's always this assumption that you're going to get everything right immediately. And any professional understands that that's just not so.”

“I'm a control freak. If you're going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.”