Top 100 My Own Work Quotes
#1. My anxiety level of my own work and what I'm doing and focusing on my art and all of that stuff? That's fundamental.
Sufjan Stevens
#2. I'm more and more fascinated in my own work. I work from 10 A.M. until about 9 P.M., but it's not an obsession, it's a pleasure. There's never enough time.
Gary Hume
#3. When I let go of my own work, my own priorities, I lost the qualities he had been attracted to in the first place. That's how he put it. He loved the woman I was before I was in love with him.
Alexis M. Smith
#4. In terms of my own work ethic, I've always been a determined person. When I'm focused on something, I try to see it through.
Ted Alexandro
#5. Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
Edwin Morgan
#6. As long as I can make lots of money in other businesses, I'll continue to subsidize my own work.
Francis Ford Coppola
#7. I really don't feel it's necessary, as an actor, to make people feel uncomfortable, just because you need to be in a certain headspace. So, I do take myself away and do my own work and hunker down.
Tom Weston-Jones
#8. I'm the biggest critic of my own work, but sometimes you nail a chapter so good that you have to take a step back and admire that bitch.
R.D. Ronald
#9. I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.
Adam Rapp
#10. When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's.
John Banville
#11. My own work in spin glass and its consequences has formed some of the intellectual basis for these interests.
Philip Warren Anderson
#12. For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#13. I never considered myself more able than anybody because I had problems just like anybody else. When I practiced, I solved problems, like any of my fellow students. I looked at my own work, and looked ahead, with blinders, almost.
Marc-Andre Hamelin
#14. If there is any irreverence in my own work, I hope it is the irreverence I bear in mistrusting my own sincere self, which then sincerely mistrusts the irreverent me. If there is a bottom to this, I think it is a life's work.
Mary Ruefle
#15. I found the best thing
I could do
was just to type away
at my own work
and let the dying
die
as they always have.
Charles Bukowski
#16. When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.
Michael Chabon
#17. I love my stuff - you're not supposed to say that. But because I'm performer as well as a writer, I'm constantly interacting with my own work. I always get to find these little secrets that I left for myself, little notes - I find them all over the scores.
Jason Robert Brown
#18. I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?
Alice Hoffman
#19. I hate incompetence. I think it's probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn't make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary.
Ayn Rand
#20. I am someone who's very positive about business, as a social Democrat. I do like the safety net of the welfare system and people setting things and creating business, and that's what I try to do with my own work: export it around the world from the U.K.
Eddie Izzard
#21. My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.
Sylvia Plath
#22. Pop music is so structured, and I'm excited to try and challenge that in my own work.
Sufjan Stevens
#23. I don't know if it's good to be stuck at one place. I'm probably too close to home on that. Because that can happen-where I'm not the best judge of my own work.
Raymond Pettibon
#24. The truth is that I don't like rehearsals. I get embarrassed hearing my own work. I assume that the cast is embarrassed to sing the stuff.
Stephen Sondheim
#26. My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.
Jennifer Weiner
#27. I tend to watch things that aren't really the genre of my own work.
Jenny Slate
#28. One good thing the teaching has given me is the ability to read and revise my own work.
Tom Barbash
#29. My issues with it are that simply in terms of my own work. It represents 30 years of output. And some of the things, some of the pieces I've used there, when I first wrote them, they seemed probably very menacing, and I hear them now, and they're just kind of pleasant, if that's the word.
Richard Meltzer
#30. I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.
Joseph Wambaugh
#31. It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?
Jonathan Franzen
#32. I'm so critical of my own work that it's difficult for me to disassociate myself and watch it as an audience.
Tobey Maguire
#33. I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11.
Adam Michnik
#34. I guess when I look over my shoulder at other designers, I feel like people are so definitive. It's so clear to me what their aesthetic is, what they're projecting. And I look at my own work and I think, Who could ever decipher what the hell is going on?
Marc Jacobs
#35. You can't live in the past, and I don't. I'm not nostalgic about my own work at all.
Elvis Costello
#36. My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.
Jeff VanderMeer
#37. I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.
Antonya Nelson
#38. I have never had much confidence in my own work, and even now when I am assured (still much to my grateful surprise) that it has value for other people, I feel diffident, reluctant as it were to expose my world of imagination to possibly contemptuous eyes and ears.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#39. I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
Madonna
#40. Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called 'Reporter' about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.
Nicholas Kristof
#41. I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.
Mel Brooks
#42. I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work.
Richard P. Feynman
#43. In my own work, I don't have favorite characters, but I have characters that I relate to the most. And I relate the most to Simon from 'The Mortal Instruments,' and also Tessa from 'The Infernal Devices.' They're more sort of bookish and shy characters.
Cassandra Clare
#45. I somehow sensed when I was a teenager that I wanted to do my own work. I was quite clear that I didn't want to be an interpretative kind of artist. I had an intuition about wanting to create my own form, in one way or another, whatever that would be.
Meredith Monk
#46. I was never really brought into the show business side of my father's life. I guess that's been a blessing and a downfall. But it's made my own work the initiation.
Stephanie Zimbalist
#47. I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
John Banville
#48. I work between my heartbeat. I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don't inhale my own work.
Willard Wigan
#49. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.
J.M. Coetzee
#50. In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.
Anthony Marra
#51. When I have my manuscript finished, more or less, I type it myself, with two fingers. I type fast with two fingers. And then when it's ready, I reread, recorrect, and retype it. Everything is my own work. I do not give it to secretaries or to typists.
Elie Wiesel
#52. For me, competition is good; that is what keeps me on my toes and keeps me going. I am always trying to better my own work, do better than my earlier films ... do films that are challenging and exciting for me.
Deepika Padukone
#53. The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.
Benjamin Graham
#54. A great percentage of the mistakes I discovered in
my own work, could be attributed to testimonies.
Raul Hilberg
#55. Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don't really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don't think you could do this.
Roy Lichtenstein
#56. I am holed up in a small village where I am doing my own work and it feels great. I have a small gallery and not many people find me, but I am happy being left alone and doing what I love.
Catherine Stock
#57. Sometimes I feel like just to get all my own work done would be great. You always feel like you're behind, and they're six other things that you wish you could get to but you can't.
Neil Burger
#58. I am very hands on doing my own work, all my own stunt work.
Jodi Lyn O'Keefe
#59. Without Ruth's partnership and encouragement over the years, my own work would have been impossible. We were called by God as a team.
Billy Graham
#60. I'm so not interested in producing, other than doing my own work, producing my own films. I only do it as favors, for other people to get their films made.
Alexander Payne
#61. I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work.
Mira Nair
#62. In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.
Mary Oliver
#63. In my own work I am invested in art as a way to break through impasses, whether those impasses are personal, social, or political.
Jill Soloway
#64. As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.
Jane Campion
#65. The fiction I tend to like is nothing like my own work. I like the kind of writing that shows me things I don't know about, and what I don't know about is the everyday, normal world.
Jim Woodring
#66. The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.
Marcel Duchamp
#67. When there wasn't a lot of work, I wrote a screenplay, 'What Lies Beneath,' which got noticed and got me more acting jobs. As I got more jobs, I was able to make my own films. That ethos of making my own work has provided me with a lot of opportunities.
Clark Gregg
#68. People talk about generating my own work, but I don't really know how to go about that. There are certainly some roles in the theater I'd like to play but I don't know if I'll ever get to do it.
Julianne Moore
#69. In my own work, I've tried to anticipate what's coming over the horizon, to hasten its arrival, and to apply it to people's lives in a meaningful way.
Paul Allen
#70. If anything, hearing another poet is a sacred experience I enter, but I can honestly say this does not influence my own work.
Grace Cavalieri
#71. In fact, since no one's been interested in my work, I took the responsibility recently to invest in my own work, so I'm producing a concert that was done at the Vision Festival in May.
Joseph Jarman
#72. Fortunately, I've never had to be too critical of my own work, because the world is critical enough.
Adrian Tomine
#73. I've always said that I myself am not the best audience for my own work, because I'm just not that receptive to comedy.
Todd Solondz
#74. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.
Kelley Armstrong
#75. I feel that every professional is the art school for the next guy. I feel that maybe a lot of the dynamism in my own work, having been felt by the rest of the artists, they'll react to it and put elements of that in their own work, feeling that it'll help it.
Jack Kirby
#76. A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short.
Susan Sontag
#78. I am in that glorious position where I can redesign and re-package my own work.
Cameron Mackintosh
#79. I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.
George Orwell
#80. I do feel that I have to use my voice for those that don't have one. I have to do the best I can in my own work to represent my culture, represent the women of my country, of Latin America. What we stand for. What we're made of.
Shakira
#81. I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.
Michael Dirda
#82. Fiction is the thing I esteem most in my own work; I feel that, even if it's no good, only I could have written those books.
Edmund White
#83. Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.
Junot Diaz
#84. When I view the world, I don't think of my own work. I think of my hope that, through art, people can get a sense of the type of invisible fabric that holds us all together, that holds the world together.
Jeff Koons
#85. But if I really want to produce my own work and tell stories, then I will.
Bill Sienkiewicz
#86. Suffice it to say that the LOR has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office.
Julie Schumacher
#87. I definitely intend to create my own work in the future so that we don't have to keep saying, We don't have work for black women.'
Lupita Nyong'o
#88. One of the things I've been talking about with my critical writing and my own work is that these movies are seen differently in a theatrical space. It's very important to me. I edit films to be seen theatrically, like fiction material I've worked on like Listen Up Phillip or other documentaries.
Robert Greene
#89. As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work.
Edward Ruscha
#90. In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.
James Schuyler
#91. As a viewer, my own work elicits strong emotional reaction from me.
Jim Hodges
#92. I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.
Ellen McLaughlin
#93. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
Alice Munro
#94. There are things I back off from trying to talk about, you know. Particularly my own work. Also, there may be things better left unsaid. At times I'd much rather talk about other (people's) work.
Garry Winogrand
#95. I am not a librarian of my own work. It's a good thing not to be involved with what you have done.
Mick Jagger
#96. I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Paul Auster
#97. I had therefore, no hesitation in giving all the information I had, even though occasionally I tried to concentrate mainly on giving information about the results of my own work.
Klaus Fuchs
#98. I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
Anne Lamott
#99. I want to keep developing. I want to become relaxed in my own work and go deeper. Just growing and studying and trying new things and hopefully having professional access to work that's good and interesting. I don't want to be on the treadmill of artificiality.
Gale Harold
#100. I do less waiting by the phone than anyone I know in the business. I don't wait for a job. I just go on to my own work.
Grace Zabriskie
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