Christopher Moore Quotes

If you have enough people sitting around telling you you're wonderful, then you start believing you're fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!

I stay off the Internet, because I'm very sensitive to commentary. There could be 10 comments of 'Fabulous job!' and one 'She's horrible!' and it completely throws me.

As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.

After 'Where the Wild Things Are,' I guess I felt more confident as a writer.

You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

I've stopped worrying about whether people think what I do is any good. I've taken stick in the past, and I've genuinely worried and got incredibly upset.

If you believe the people who love you, you get lazy. And if you believe the people who hate you, you become... maybe intimidated, or whatever the word might be, and you don't write as well.

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

I used to not be confident. My father certainly didn't add to my confidence. When I was 17 or 18, I was voted the most beautiful girl in England by the association of press photographers. When they called Daddy for a comment, he said, 'I'm amazed. She's a nice looking girl, but nothing special.'

It's hard not to let criticism make you feel bad about yourself - I do continue to struggle with that as an older woman in the workplace.

You build up the opponent, and you lose confidence.

Sometimes I just go, 'Is it me? Am I really just not that likeable?' The cool thing is, when you go out there and see a lady get mad or a guy get mad, or they hate you because you didn't come from the independents, or whatever, what I like to do is just pour kerosene on that fire.

Everything that happened to me as a child was the perfect breeding ground for a rock n' roll singer. It toughened me up. I was on edge; I was needy. I needed people to like me 'cause it made me feel safe... and that gave me confidence.

I have worked really hard to get to where I am, and I like it when I read praise, and I get upset when I read bad messages. It's all part of being human.

When you're all alone out there, on the end of the typewriter, with each new story a new appraisal by the world of whether you can still get it up or not, arrogance and self-esteem and deep breathing are all you have. It often looks like egomania. I assure you it's the bold coverup of the absolutely terrified.

Constant criticism can wear one down and weaken knees.

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.

I was used to being disliked as a kid. Not that I didn't deserve it: I was a pretty sad and unappealing creature, and still am, I guess. It's sort of simplistic to think that one tries to make stuff that accounts for one's repulsiveness as a person, but there's some truth to it. So, when I read something unfavorable, I always take it deeply personally. It's as if my efforts have been in vain, and I should just quit.

Few things build a person up like affirmation. According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the word affirm comes from ad firmare, which means “to make firm.” So when you affirm people, you make firm within them the things you see about them. Do that often enough, and the belief that solidifies within them will become stronger than the doubts they have about themselves.

The greatest natural enemy of women is insecurity. We all feel it and we all think we are the only ones who feel that way. How we deal with these fears determines to a great extent how effective we are in running our lives. Most women present a façade to the world and keep the insecurity locked inside. The toughest job in the world is to be a complete, happy woman.

Well, laddie, if you've let an old buzzard like me hurt you confidence, you couldn't have had much in the first place.

I read one thing, and 100 people can say good things then you read one bad thing that says you're the worst and you believe them.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

If another person only had in his storehouse of deserved self-esteem what you had put there, what would he have to draw upon and to sustain him?