Pat Mastelotto Quotes

You create a blueprint of your best performance, and you're happiest the night you surpass that blueprint. That won't happen that often, but it will happen. It's like sculpting: you keep refining. When you have a piece that is yours, that is just you, that becomes obsessive; you think about it all the time.

This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.

I've never been happy with the quality of my work. I always felt as though my musicianship was lacking and that I should have worked harder at it when I was younger. As I sang and sang, I improved.

I don't know if people realize how hard I work, because sometimes people ask me for my secret. The truth is that I don't have any secrets apart from the fact that I've been directing theater and film for twenty years and trying at every stage to make my work better.

I am never happy with what I do, so I try not to watch stuff that is filmed with me in it because I am always like, 'Oh, I could have done that a little bit better,' or, 'I could have done that differently - that riff could have been a little better.'

Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.

I'm never happy with my performance.

If I drop a ball, I'm going to beat myself up, or if I go out and a rep isn't perfect, I feel like I've got to do it again.

I'm a very tough critic of my guitar-playing. Sometimes I don't even want to do it anymore.

All work is a process of failure. Every single thing I write, I look at it and go, 'Do better. That's not good enough. Do better.' And so, that keeps me up at night.

Perfectionism doesn't believe in practice shots. It doesn't believe in improvement. Perfectionism has never heard that anything worth doing is worth doing badly--and that if we allow ourselves to do something badly we might in time become quite good at it. Perfectionism measures our beginner's work against the finished work of masters. Perfectionism thrives on comparison and competition. It doesn't know how to say, "Good try," or "Job well done." The critic does not believe in creative glee--or any glee at all, for that matter. No, perfectionism is a serious matter.

Every single time I step into the studio, I say, 'Can I still do this? Do I still have it? Have I ever had it?' I suppose there's a good amount of self-loathing that goes into any form of artisanship.

You can have a knack for dancing, but you still have to practice till your feet are bleeding to be worthy of being in front of an audience.

I was really conscious of that when I went in because I felt that I was pretty solid on the first one, but I didn't have the groove exactly where I wanted it.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

I am not an 'instant' actor... to really do anything, I've got to try it five or six or a dozen times.

Part of creating is understanding that there is always more to do; nothing is ever completely finished.

I can't begin to describe the amount of crap I've taken for being a lousy free-throw shooter.

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn't.

The beauty of it is when you can just show up and hit the notes.

The more I come to understand music, the more I feel like a numbskull because there is always more to learn. The more I do it, the more I'm humbled. I'm just always trying to get better at it. I pick up a few tricks along the way.

If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I'll watch myself back on 'Xtra Factor' and want to do it again because of a few hiccups.

I really believe in myself. I'm the hardest worker I know, and one of the best songwriters. There's a craft to it, and it takes a long time to hone it, and I work really hard at it.