As a newly married, young mother in my first home, I spent a lot of time pulling up carpet, scraping off wallpaper, arranging, and rearranging furniture. Don’t judge me– I sponge painted one bathroom in pale pink, and across the top of the wall in the other I stenciled a geometric design of yellow and black. I hung Laura Ashley print balloon curtains in the kitchen.
Please, it was the 80s!
But because my father was a painter and a professor at Pratt Institute (and later the Chairman of the Art Department at SUNY New Paltz), and because my grandfather had been one of the most famous illustrators in the 1920s and 30s, the one thing I never had to do in my new house was buy art. 
Not the silverpoint drawing of my grandmother, not the print from a copper etching plate depicting a scene in Paris, not the authentic full-sized propaganda poster my grandfather was commissioned to paint during WWI, not the realistic ceramic blueberry pie that sat on the table with one slice missing, not the original color illustration that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post to illustrate a short story by F.Scott Fitzgerald, not the huge architectural landscape painting of the Maritime Center in Norwalk, not the series of collages with accompanying excerpts from Russian literature. Every one of the paintings and drawings that I framed and hung on the walls of my home were gifts to me. Part of my family legacy. 
Then one day my father came to visit us.
“Do you have a screwdriver?” he asked me.
Of course I had a screwdriver. I handed it over innocently. “Why do you want it?” I asked.
He was looking up at the wall where one of his landscapes hung, a pastoral depiction of Bonticou Crag in the Wallkill Valley with the iconic tower at Mohonk Mountain House standing tall in background.
“I want to destroy this one, it’s terrible,” he said. “And maybe a couple more.”
I knew those paintings weren’t his best, but I didn’t understand why he felt like destroying them. Not really, not completely. Not until years later, after I had been published and I was doing my first book signing at a local library. Standing at the podium, I opened my first novel to the two or three pages I had decided would be best to read to an audience, and I began. Without thinking about it, I found myself skipping entire phrases, deleting words and adding new ones, changing pronouns to nouns, and vice versa. In other words, I was still writing.
Understand, I had revised this book many times. I had read it out loud to myself from beginning to end. It had been copy edited and proofread by professional editors. And yet . . .I knew I could do better.
I wasn’t exactly tearing up my book, or pulling it down off the wall, but from then on, before any public readings, I always took a pencil and crossed out unnecessary words; sometimes I changed the order of my sentences, or even deleted whole paragraphs.
I heard someone once say at a conference: Writing is never done, it's just due.
It's so true. No work of art is ever perfect and if you think it is, you might want to rethink yourself as an artist.
For this reason, I never reread any book of mine that is already in print. I can barely open the front cover. Not without an imaginary screwdriver nearby.