Quotes About Revision

That fellow Einstein suits his convenience. Every year he retracts what he wrote the year before.

All my thoughts are second thoughts.

When you write a page and delete the whole thing, there is a sense in which it is not deleted. The better writer who remained behind is still there.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

When you're deep in study mode, stop every thirty minutes to review what you've just learned. Repeat the information you just covered out loud to yourself. This helps cement it in your brain even more when you want to recall it.

Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.

But that's the nice thing about looking backwards. You can pick out the bits that suit your story and toss the unhappy truths to the wind.

revisions based on readers' responses, however trying, make things better.

There is no great writing, only great rewriting.

As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don't rerun it.

In art or architecture your project is only done when you say it's done. If you want to rip it apart at the eleventh hour and start all over again, you never finish. I was one of those crazy creatures.

If a proposal doesn't prove out as expected when we run it, sometimes we change the model.

Scientists are very afraid of being proven wrong.

Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.

I can't remember who said, 'No film is completed, just abandoned,' but I think most filmmakers will tell you that they could endlessly fiddle with their films for the next couple of decades, you know, changing things, altering things.

You get so deep into something when you are filming, it's almost like writing it again when you are in the edit.

Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I'm going to have to think about how it will affect other people.

A movie is very different when you're writing the script and you're building a story compared to what the final product is.

When people finance a movie, they have their own ideas and have things they want to change.

On every show, there's some amount of work that is brought to some state of completion - or even finished - and then cut out of the movie.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I always want to cut every single line, possibly, that is mine from the script. One of the first things I do on any script is to shred, shred and shred my lines.

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

To be honest, I rewrote 'Wicked Nights' a number of times. I just wasn't happy with the end result.