Quotes About Revision

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Though the Grimms kept about 100 of the tales from the first edition, they changed them a good deal.

Usually, by the time I hit 'save' before taking a nap, my word count has gone down, but the world I'm creating feels more tangible than it did before.

You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

changing code or behavior is not a big issue, it just needs to be released, but revising data structures can involve a huge effort in transforming the old version into a newer one

In 1829 Rossini was at an age which has often proven critical in the lives of musicians, painters and writers. Lapses into silence far more complete than Rossini's, creative failures, suicides, and unanticipated deaths have been common in the middle to late 30s. As Charles Rosen has noted, 'It is the age when the most fluent composer begins to lose the ease of inspiration he once possessed, when even Mozart had to make sketches and to revise'.

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it.

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The Real Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.

as Bucky Fuller said, "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events". NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY. The universe consists of NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY apprehended events. Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you've got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't," Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

When I'm stuck," Healy said, "I go over it." "All of it," Jesse said. "Start at page one of my notebook and go page by page all the way through.

The beautiful part about writing is you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

During those days, both the bed and my little rickety table were swimming in notes and scribbled-over manuscripts that I took turns working on, adding new ideas that occurred to me in the course of the day, crossing out material or freshening up the dead passages with a lively word here or there, and pushing on from sentence to sentence with great labor.

Continually revise your relationship to God until the only certainty you have is not that you are faithful, but that He is.

the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

science...accepts that the things we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.

When I finished the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober, I joined Sisters in Crime and, later, Mystery Writers of America. After that, it was a matter of doing a lot of revision, sending out hundreds of queries over several years, and applying "talent, persistence, and luck"--sometimes known as "persistence, persistence, persistence."

A spiritual path is a living thing, and living things grow and change. Many people fear change when it involves their spiritual practice or theology for various reasons. However, growth involves change. If we do not grow, we risk begrudgingly plodding down a path that doesn't serve our highest good. We must allow ourselves to expand, revise, and find our own spiritual truth and path. A healthy spiritual path is one that includes constant growth. Growth almost inherently includes change.

When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing you've done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer - and there aren't many, in face I can't think of any other - is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you can make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it's not going to be what you're looking at now.

There's no way to guarantee that any particular system will work, will work forever, or will not need endless revising. But until we get over the idea that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to schools, above all for schools that are trustworthy enough to do the job well, we won't allow ourselves to do the difficult long-term work of redesigning the system, not just the schools.

Great poets are great copy editors.