Quotes About Revision

the process of revising a poem is no arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level. —Jane Hirshfield

I never fail to be mystified by those who regard the revision of a former opinion as a sign of weakness.

The good old days sucked.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

Because of multiple drafts I have been accused of self-discipline. Really I am self-indulgent, I cherish revising so much.

A Director Makes Only One Movie in His Life. Then He Breaks It Into Pieces and Makes It Again.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Shera's Two Laws of Cataloging: Law #1, No cataloger will accept the work of any other cataloger. Law #2: No cataloger will accept his/her own work six months after the cataloging.

I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.

The only kind of writing is rewriting.

You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

There is no such thing as great writing - there is only great re-writing!

The first draft is always shit.

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

Write drunk; edit sober.

Write the best story you can and throw out all the good lines.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing … I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times….The first draft of anything is shit.

the past is what actually happened. History is merely what someone wrote.

It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.

In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.

I did a geography degree, and if you told me whilst I was ignoring my geography degree revision in order to watch another episode of '24' that one day I wouldn't need that geography degree and I'd actually be in '24,' I'd have been quite pleased, I think.

Chiki Sarkar edited 'Mrs Funnybones,' and she is a ruthless but kind editor to work with. The only lesson I learnt during this process was to say, 'Yes, Prime Minister,' and re-write.

I've always loved the editing process.

Well, there are three different processes of making a film, of course. They're sort of re-written three times. You write it to start with, and then you shoot it and you re-write it while shooting and you sort of re-write it as you edit.