Fay Weldon Quotes

You need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and not come away thinking, "Hey, there's something wrong with this mirror."

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score.... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'

You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.

Who judges best of a Man, his Enemies or himself?

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually ... I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.

Get to know yourself. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see. Know also when you actually have thought through to the nature of the thing with which you are dealing and when you are not thinking at all... Knowing yourself and knowing the facts, you can judge whether you can change the situation so it is more to your liking. If you cannot--or if you do not know how to improve on things--then discipline yourself to the adjustments that will be necessary.

I'm my own biggest critic. I'm the one who has to go home and look at myself in the mirror.

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.

When you talk yourself, you think how witty, how original, how acute you are; but when another does so, you are very apt to think only - What a crib from Rochefoucauld!

I'm a very vicious critic of myself.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

I'm not good at watching myself.

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.

An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.

It's hard to talk about yourself.

No one ever judges their own self.

There is no country in the world where the process of self-criticism and self-correction is more active than in the United States.

It's difficult to judge yourself.

I'm the greatest critic of my work.

You have to be able to analyze yourself and critique yourself from every which way.

To mark all that I say in conversation, merely to beget in others, a good opinion of myself, and examine it.

When all is said, a man's final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself

Ignorance is always ready to admire itself. Procure yourself critical friends.

I trust you to find the good in me, but the bad I must be sure you don't overlook.