Creative Imperfection Quotes

I'd say that about 82 percent of what I write is bad, but don't go by me; I'm as bad a judge as I am a writer. Look, if it were all good, you'd be paying twice as much for this book.

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

Remember that your job as a practicing writer is to remember it's never going to be perfect on your first pass.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

I sometimes make pictures which are not up to my standard, but then it can only be said of a mediocrity that all his work is up to his standard.

And no book, and possibly no painting, when it is finished, is ever exactly like the first dream of it.

We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create, and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesen't remind us what we did badly, it reminds us what we know we could do better.

What I've learned from sketch is you can get it as perfect as you want, and it's never going to be perfect.

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

I think it's important for anyone who is artistic to look back on their body of work and be critical. Maybe the Beatles can look back and say everything was perfect, but we've come up with hundreds and hundreds of dishes, and anyone who is honest with themselves has to realize that every single one wasn't an absolute, unequivocal home run.

I write my own songs, and I only see their flaws.

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

The finest wits have their sediment.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

You finish a movie and you think, there, you've done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks.

It is the striving after perfection that makes one an artist. It is the sense that one is imperfect, unfulfilled, unfinished. One attempts by a superhuman effort to fill the gap, to leap over it, to finish it in another medium. And one creates a third and separate thing: 'Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America.

The hardest thing, as a director, is that it's never right. Nothing you do is ever right. It's never exactly how you envision it. Making a movie is about making it better.