Quotes About Revision

That's the past. I don't agree with retrospect.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

I hate editing. I love to write, but I hate to reread my stuff. To revise.

When I create a character, it happens in layers. The more I write and revise, the better I understand the characters.

If the AAP comes to power, we will revise laws on road safety.

The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act.

I write first drafts by hand, often out of the house somewhere, and then, when I've got a draft, type it up and let it sit, sometimes for a long time, and then when I'm ready, I work on revision.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

I've often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn't really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn't seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

Not every script that rolls in is ready to shoot. Few are, actually. So you go back and work on the thing.

It is easier to rewrite anything - even the worst writing in the world - than it is to write something from scratch.

I do a lot of screen re-writing.

I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it.

You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you've done.

We would say, OK, the B section isn't good enough, let's rewrite that,' until we felt the song was great.

I revise obsessively. It's important to me to have a clean page.

When I'm working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

I rewrite a lot until I get the rhythm and story right on the page.