“Have you noticed just how often the critics disagree with one another? And how often they’re just wrong?

“And yet we not only read them, but we believe them. Worse, we judge ourselves, contrasting our feelings with their words. Worse still, we sometimes think we hear the feared critic’s voice before we even ship our work out the door…

“Every single book I’ve written has gotten at least a few one star reviews on Amazon. Every one. The lowest possible rating, the rating of, “don’t bother reading this, in fact it never should have been written.” Not just me, of course. Far better writers, writers like Fitzgerald, Orwell and Kincaid have gotten even more one-star reviews on their books than I can ever hope to.”

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I will only add that if you have perfectionist tendencies, then your inner critic is probably the least reliable critic of all.