Mike Gordon Quotes

I don't very often think I've done a good job. I don't like the majority of what I do. I shouldn't say I don't like it, but I'm not satisfied with almost everything that I do.

You can finish the day's filming or the whole shoot or watch something months later and think you could have done it so much better. It's frustrating.

My stories are never quite good enough.

No matter what you write or choreograph, you feel it's not enough.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.

I'm never happy with my work. I always go back home thinking I could have done so so much better.

I'm very picky; I'm never happy with anything. It's so hard to give the record away and accept that you're done.

I was surrounded by a lot of people not doing what they wanted to do.

I have not been a success, and probably never will be.

I have an enormous sense of having failed in life.

I never made a film which fully satisfied me.

I always seemed to disappoint them. They expected me to be different than Henry or exactly like Henry. I was neither.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

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

My life has been nothing but a failure.

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.

Usually, with the work I've done, by the end, I usually feel like it's a failure. It doesn't matter how it's received.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

I'm a lot of things, but none of them are great.

What keeps me going is a constant sense of disappointment with what I've already done.

My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent.

There will always be times where you think, 'What went wrong? Why wasn't that one more popular?' You can't always figure that out, especially if you think you've done the best job you can do and was interesting to you. I mean, 'My Soul to Take,' I thought should have done much better, and I still like that film a lot.

Nothing ever comes out the way I hope it will. That first vision, that initial vision you have of a book, what it's going to be like when it's done, it begins to go wrong the second you start to write.

Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure. Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was.