Quotes About Revision

adjustment is a must.

He believed, like all good radicals, that everything ought to be examined anew by each generation. What served society should be retained, and what did not should be discarded without sentiment or reserve.

Further editing deepens a story.

That's the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

Write down important formulas, facts, definitions, and/or keywords in the margin first so you won't worry about

A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.

What I miss most since computers is the existence of rough drafts. […]. I miss the mistakes, the words scribbled in the margin, the chaos, the arrows pointing all over the place – all those signs of movement, of life, of unresolved searching.

That's religion in America, under constant revision.

Stockpiling Words, Language, and Lyrics—doing exercises like freewriting, writing poems, refining, and revising, all of which I'll talk about in the next section Stockpiling Music, Songs, and Parts of Songs—making demo recordings, practicing, learning other people's songs, and writing parts for songs in progress Pairing Words and Music—writing lyrics to a melody and searching for matches between stockpiled demos and lyric sets, poems, and freewriting

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.

History is written by the last fellow at the typewriter.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

Early ideas are not necessarily true ideas.

you need to know that our interpreta- tion of the past can't be right.

When thinking one cannot avoid beginning with certain convictions, but one must be aware that these convictions can be questioned and need to be defended with argument. One must also be aware that one's attempts to defend these convictions may fail, so that one may have to abandon or revise one's convictions. Thinking in an open-ended way does not mean starting from nowhere, but it does mean being able to arrive wherever thought and argument lead.

You can always improve on something, the technology is different today, but I would leave it well alone. If there was something that was incomplete, that might be interesting... because I do that on my website.

I've polished up stories for their reprinted appearances. I guess there's always something to be changed or improved, but one could get carried away and work on one story indefinitely. I'm too restless for that, too eager to begin the next one.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

The Constitution is a document that should only be amended with great caution.

I can only get to a certain point as I write and then I have individual conversations with everyone that I cast. I always do a rewrite based on the conversations.

If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.

I'm not aware of a cadence when writing, but I hear it after. I write in longhand, and that helps. You're closer to it, and you have to cross things out. You put a line through it, but it's still there. You might need it. When you erase a line on a computer, it's gone forever.

That's the beauty of the animation process: It takes so long, you have so many chances to improve it.