Quotes About Revision

It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.

Not many poets have editors.

From our point of view, the most exciting thing would be if we discovered something really fundamental in our understanding was just off a bit - and that now we have a chance to revisit it.

History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of it.

I found a mistake in a rule. They addressed the wrong rule number... I pointed it out, did an amendment, and everybody was happy after that.

I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started.

When we first put 'Let It Be' out, I had to cut out a lot of stuff that I really like and wanted to stay in there. The stuff in the new DVD has a lot of the stuff that had to be cut out. So for me, it's like the egg is now complete.

You've got to be an editor in order to be a good composer.

I suspect that writers and other creators are never really finished with any work.

I think I learned most from editing, both editing myself and having someone else edit me. It's not always easy to have someone criticize your work, your baby. But if you can swallow your ego, you can really learn from the editing.

Sometimes you can feel the gears shifting in scripts, like really trying to make something work that feels sweaty for whatever reason. I really enjoy reading material that just flows - it's definitely a skill to make something feel effortless.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

Within the religious realm, the same can be said about that type of'apologetics' that claims to agree with the results of modern science-an utterly illusory undertaking and one that constantly requires revision; one that also runs the risk of linking religion with changing and ephemeral conceptions, from which it must remain completely independent.

When asked by the New York Times why she altered her position, she quoted the great economist John Maynard Keynes: "when the facts change, I change my mind.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right just before they go on to the next one.

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

Someone once told me a memory is just another draft of a story.

It really is brilliant news that historians can just never get things right.

A very good editor is almost a collaborator.

She had always had this ability to make him revise his attitudes, he recalled. It was an uncomfortable process, but she was often right.

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.