Joy Williams Quotes

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.

We're taught at such a young age that you can always be better and that you're never perfect and that you're never good enough.

You're always 'too' something.

I tried to make the best music that I could possibly make, and then nothing was ever good enough.

I've never been super confident about anything. The work is never as good as it could be.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.

I never made a film which fully satisfied me.

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.

I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.

If I didn't do something perfectly, I had to do it again... I grew up with a glue gun pointed at my head.

As an actor, you're constantly riddled with self-doubt. You are your own worst critic.

No one leaves the edit room thinking, 'Yeah, I nailed that one!' Everyone I know goes into their first premiere or their first screening thinking, 'I screwed up so bad. I'm sorry, I messed up.' It's just a real common feeling.

The word that I constantly hear out of women is 'fear.' It's almost like a background melody. Women have excellent degrees and experience, but we are afraid we aren't good enough because we have such high expectations.

Usually when I see myself in a film or on television, there's about a six-month period where I can't look at it because all I'll see are the mistakes. I'm just appalled by the person that I see.

I don't know many artists who are happy with themselves all of the time.

It's pretty disabling sometimes, the terror of not living up. My expectations are the worst.

I definitely have a tendency to only see the blemishes of things, and see lots of things about my acting that I don't like.

I do have high standards. I look at everything I have done and think, 'Why wasn't that better?' Part of my motivation is from crippling self-doubt - I have got to prove myself wrong.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.

It's almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I'm just going, 'Any moment, someone's going to find out I'm a total fraud, and that I don't deserve any of what I've achieved. I can't possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone's expectations of me are.'

I want to be perfect. I don't want to fail. And you always fail.

I wish you could make money and people never saw what you did. Then you could relax and not care about how bad you are.

Perfectionism is really a challenge for me, and it causes me to be super-critical of myself in so many ways: about body image constantly; about parenting; about being a mother.

I'm pretty self-critical about everything I've ever done: stand-up, 'SNL.'

I've learned how my own perfectionism can cripple me.