Quotes About Revision

I wrote five issues of that and got the sack. Actually, they paid me for eight, but they changed their minds about the direction and threw three issues out the window.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?

I feel like the great filmmakers who have a true voice, yeah they take the notes, they understand the notes, but it's really about the notes underneath the notes. When you do a test screening and somebody says, 'Well, I didn't like the love story,' but it was probably just too long.

Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.

After I finish writing a chapter, I'll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

Even the best writer has to erase

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire.

The works of the past don't have to be right to be great works.

until after we publish.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...

As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. As a teenager, I virtually memorized my paperback editions, greedy for insider tips about the literary life. Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Colette, Waugh—they were all there. What has stuck with me the most over the years is their almost universal insistence on the importance of revision, of revising and revising again.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Truth lies in the hands of its editor.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.

Once I finish shooting a film, I usually sit on it to see how we can make it better.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

You have the RIGHT to change your mind

I love being a writer in a medium where they have to ask you, 'Can I change this line?'

I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.