Howard Finster Quotes

The only albatross is the hurt you divine from what people say about your art.

I constantly try to reinvent my sensibilities and my ideas. I enjoy some of the satisfaction that I get when I feel good about what I've done. But the process is quite lonely and quite painful.

I feel like I've cheated. I never knew what to do. I was never a good enough painter to earn a living, and so I drifted into the theatre, and I've had a successful life. I feel guilty that I've never done a day's work in my life!

And it is easy to believe you are not good enough if you listen to everybody else.

There's too much darkness in the world. Everywhere you turn, someone is tryin' to tear someone down in some way; everywhere you go, there's a feeling of inadequacy, or a feeling that you're not good enough. I want to bring a certain light to the world.

Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.

I don't even like showing my stuff to publishers and editors much.

Critics can be your most important friend. I don't read criticism of my stuff only because when it's bad, it's rough-and when it's good, it's not good enough.

I started painting graffiti in the classic New York style of big letters and characters but I was never very good at it.

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.

I'm kind of an insecure artist. I hop from piece to piece. I always think my life depends on every painting. Every painting is my first painting.

I've never trained as an actor. I've always thought I'm not a good actor. I've been told I'm not a good actor by a lot of people.

Being in Los Angeles is this brutal awakening, where I feel not good enough as soon as I walk into a room, and I'm wearing the wrong thing, or I don't have enough make up on. It's all about image.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is like a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

Growing up in the entertainment industry, I've had a lot of people tell me I'm not good enough.

Every day I wake up afraid that I won't be able to write, that today is the day it has left me.

I hated painting, and I quit right after high school because I was continually told how terrific I was... it made me feel shaky.

I'm as crippled with doubt as the next actor.

I've got to overcome that tendency to hide what I write or throw it away.

I've always felt very insecure being around in-laws, even my siblings - like the guy who made a bad decision, or the guy who would never just fess up that I'm not good enough to make it, or I don't have what it takes.

Steven Spielberg has this great quote: "Moviemaking is always about noise. There's so many voices that you've gotta listen to. But you've always got to pay attention to the one voice that's in your gut that always tells you it's still not good enough."

The President hears a hundred voices telling him that he is the greatest man in the world. He must listen carefully indeed to hear the one voice that tells him his is not.

Most writers or performers walk around with the notion in their head that - a paranoid worry that maybe people don't like them.

Comedy is frightening at first because you're opening yourself up. When it's just you and people hate it, you're like, "Oh God. Do they hate me?"