Quotes About Revision

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

I move through it like a phantom, and I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

A good edit process turns rocks into diamonds, and every author should love that part as much as the creative phase. I do love it. It's a different side to writing. It's like the fine-tuning.

Allen Ginsberg instructs: First thought, best thought. Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse. Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, 'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the highly complex and satisfying process of creation.

History is not the past as it really was. It's the shape we give it.

Having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.

All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.

Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.

I like making things. I enjoy putting words and images on a blank space. There should be joy in the writing itself because parts of it are so challenging and lonesome. I take great pleasure in reading, researching, and interviewing. I enjoy forming my sentences and revising them to make them clean.

The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Through revision is where a lot of learning happened and a lot of forgiveness happened.

I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.

My first signature was pretty long, but someone said, 'You need to shorten that up so much.'

When we first signed to Loud, we had a 20-song demo. So all of those songs we wanted to put on the album. But we started making new ones, and through process of elimination, we wanted all the new ones. We didn't like the old ones no more.

No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That's why they call it rewriting.

We can always revise and revisit once we've acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.

We can always revise and revisit once we've acted. But we can

what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

Be aware that every word you know is going to try to sneak into your manuscript.

My self-editing process is intense.

Only in your imagination can you revise.

Nature repeats herself, or almost does: repeat, repeat, repeat, revise, revise, revise.