Sadie Jones Quotes

My stories are never quite good enough.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I had such high expectations of myself. I was going to be the best mother, the best housewife, the best entertainer, the best nurse, you know - what it was, I was going to be the best. And I could never live up to my expectations.

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.

I continue to wish that writing were easier, that it would flow out completely perfect with no need for revisions.

I just mean it's very difficult for me to watch my work, in some ways, because I am critical of what I didn't get across or I thought I was making one point.

I have a lot of what you might call creative self-loathing - I have pretty high expectations, and they seem to consistently be higher than what I'm able to accomplish.

I write really slowly, and my lines are really, really terrible all the time. It takes so long for me to get them to be where I won't be embarrassed to sing them, and then feel like they're great.

Perfectionism rarely begets perfection, or satisfaction - only disappointment.

The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.

I wrote lots of pages. I showed what I wrote to Iowa friends, and they said, 'Good start.' That was discouraging because I thought it was almost done.

I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

Holidays in general breed unrealistic expectations. The minute you start wondering, 'is it going to be wonderful enough?,' it never will be.

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.