William Faulkner Quotes

Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.

In my early twenties, that's when I really began to write. Before that, I was too busy working, keeping myself going.

I'll need my whole lifetime to polish my craft.

The arts were like, there's no opponent. It's just yourself. I'm not saying they don't make the arts a competition with awards and all that, but that's outside the work itself.

How do I feel when I look back at prior work? Hmmm. I think, 'I tried to do the best I could do. It's not perfect. It will never be perfect.' And then I think, 'I want to try again.'

When you do your art, and you may think people don't recognize it or appreciate it, you actually go and try to get better.

I think, as a performer, the biggest challenge is that you want to do a good job, pushing yourself. You want to go the extra mile every time.

Most good work is a combination of parts you love and parts you could do better. My constant mantra is, 'Next time, next time, next time.'

I want to get out as much art as I can while I'm here, and I seem to get better the more that I do it.

As I wrote more I became more critical of myself and I think that you have to be your harshest judge. I don't ever believe that what I write is my best work. I always think that I can hone it. I can always think that I can make it a little bit better.

I think Ive done the best I could have done. But I keep wanting to play better, go further. There are so many sounds I still want to make, so many things I havent yet done. When I was younger I thought maybe Id reached that peak. But Im 86 now, and if I make it through to next month, Ill be 87. And now I know it can never be perfect, it can never be exactly what it should be, so you got to keep going further, getting better.

If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.

Criticism does not disturb me, for I am my own severest critic. Always in my playing I strive to surpass myself, and it is this constant struggle that makes music fascinating to me.

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools... I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing.

Perfection is impossibility but striving for perfection is not. Do the best you can. That is what counts.

I'm still looking to write a great song.... You always are. You know, you never think, 'Well, that's enough ... that's good enough.'

If you have done something once, you can do it again or you can do it better. The beauty is the pursuit of the limit, not the limit itself. At least that's what I hope people realize.

Perfection does not exist -- you can always do better and you can always grow.

Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.

One of the most essential things you need to do for yourself is to choose a goal that is important to you. Perfection does not exist - you can always do better and you can always grow.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

If you take a diamond that's raw and you put one face to it, it has that one face, and then you've gotta find another face. At the end, you're going to have this diamond that's everything you've done. I feel that's the way you should look at it because that puts you in a constant state of progress.

Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.

Just because you're perfectionist doesn't mean you're perfect.