Quotes About Revision

I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

He left to do whatever editors do.

I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

What had been the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 became the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, which it still is today.

And for a hundred visions and revisions

You don't think history gets rewritten, sometimes?

He needed to "kill his darlings"—Stephen King's favorite term for letting go of stuff that just doesn't work.

Memories are tricky; there's what you remember, and what you think you remember, the editions and redactions of memory, the corrections and amendations and blundered readings and the whole apparatus criticus of the conscious mind trying to make bread out of soup.

It was good to know that memory could be melted down and recast if it came out flawed the first time around, just like a bell.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.

An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board and a wrecking ball at the site.

That's the thing with good poets. They structure and decide and re-write and insert, but some of the magic comes from a place beyond intention.

That's the thing with good poets. They structure and decide and re-write and insert, but some of the magic comes from the place beyond intention.

Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

For me, if I have writer's block it means I know that what I am writing is not working quite right and I need to go back and fix what is not right. And once I do that I can write onward. Sometimes writer's block is just I'm in a funk that day and my writing just isn't working. In that case I write anyway and then throw it away. You can always write. Writer's block is 'I can't write because what I'm writing is crap.

from A Love Story, Eight Takes) 8 As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell this story. I was wrong to tell you how multi-true everything is, when it would be truer to say nothing. I've invented so much and prevented more. But I'd like to talk with you about other things, in absolute quiet. In extreme context. To see you again, isn't love revision? It could have gone so many ways. This just one of the ways it went. Tell me another.

Not that the story need to be long, but it will take a long time to shorten it

But, yes, now I wouldn't do some of those soundtracks the way I did them.

If you have reason to think that yesterday's forecast went wrong, there is no glory in sticking to it.

I rise at 6. Strong coffee helps me face the paper edition of 'The New York Times.' It daily challenges my own capacity for faking anything deranged enough to sound true. I work till 2 P.M. unless I am in the throes of finishing something. I rewrite to be reread.

Musicals are written and then rewritten. Those things used to happen on the road. Now they are done in New York during preview performances.

It's so important, after a song is finished, to go to sleep and listen to the song with fresh ears the next day. It's sometimes a traumatic event. And playing it for someone else for the first time - that is the most nerve-wracking thing of all. But we learn so much.