Quotes About Revision

No one reads my books until they're finished because I don't want feedback. It confuses me, and it changes things; if I get too much feedback, I get thrown off my path.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I always entertain the notion that I'm wrong, or that I'll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Almost every scene, I re-think as Im about to start drawing it, and at least half of the time Im changing dialogue or whatever, or adding scenes or different things.

Laws and institutions, like clocks, must occasionally be cleaned, wound up, and set to true time.

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

In retrospect, I think it's a plus, because now we've been able to go back and spend extra time on each of those episodes and make them better.

Part of the writer's task is to recognize what he's done, then dive back in and make the connections clearer. I'm a strong believer in getting things right the ninth or tenth time.

Half of learning is learning. The other half of learning is unlearning.

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day

Once the first draft is done, the really tough work begins.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

Even when the laws have been written down, they ought not always remain unchanged.

All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.