Greg Mottola Quotes

I'm my worst critic, and I like the fact that I can listen to myself now and make fun of myself, listen, make changes - 'Oh, man, that's messed up. Okay, I need to work on that; I need to work on this.'

I try and put myself in other peoples eyes, as I dont feel I've got anything new to say about myself at 23.

Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don't, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.

Your inability to see yourself clearly is what's keeping you alive.

I'm not very pious about anything, fortunately, but I'm skewering myself first. I'm skewering things that I care about and things that are important to me and then just my own foibles.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.

I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

I tell the truth, and I expose myself as a weak, misguided, misdirected, dysfunctional human being I used to be.

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.

All the work I do is personal, so the good stuff and the bad stuff that you see in there is all good stuff and bad stuff that I have, and part of the journey, for me, has been to embrace these things that I find embarrassing about myself: my stubbornness, my ego, my maudlin-ness - these things that I see myself do, and I go, 'Oh, David, stop that!'

I am not a performing seal. In your writing, you are tapping into the part that is 'the best' in you. But what you are also filters through in your writing your prejudices, your bitterness. I am not a pretentious person.

Nobody's a better critic of myself than me, and I try to do the best I can.

Sometimes I feel drawn to writing about my shortcomings because I'm chock full of them.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got.

Watching myself still makes me uneasy - and when you're younger, you're even more unforgiving.

The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

I am never more myself than in my self-betrayals.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. . .

It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us. This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good heart whatever they might have to say.