Quotes About Revision

I wouldn't be lying. I'd just be editing my report for length.

In 1992, teachers all over the country, by the thousands, were beginning to teach the Columbus story in new ways, to recognize that to Native Americans, Columbus and his men were not heroes, but marauders. The point being not just to revise our view of past events, but to be provoked to think about today.

As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.

I don't miss scenes at all the way that I used to miss them when I was younger making a film. It's actually quite fun to get rid of them now.

It's a maddening thing in itself to look at an old poem of yours. To translate it is even more maddening.

You want to keep it in there because you feel like it's yours but to be able to see that sometimes some stuff needs to go and I think it's for the benefit of the film.

For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.

Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.

When we can commit a crime, we can also trigger debate. Cases go to courts. Media start covering the cases. But once you build smart environments where, if you meet a certain probabilistic profile, you won't even be allowed to board a bus, let alone commit a crime, we're perpetuating existing laws so they face no challenges or revision.

For any writer, a red pen is such a trigger.

I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy - although we're not calling it that.

The DVD does make it a little easier for myself to trim things that are otherwise very difficult to let loose of - knowing that they'll make it on the DVD.

I'm a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I'll keep fooling with it forever.

I like the idea of taking a true classic written by a true genius and destroying it essentially! I like the idea of bringing it down to earth a bit - and even a bit lower than that.

As consequential and as deadly as the coronavirus pandemic has been, and will continue to be, the Trump media machine can't stop and won't stop its relentless propagandizing and historical revision. Trump is the hero.

Opinions are made to be changed - or how is truth to be got at?

A new untruth is better than an old truth.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.

Strange how the past was remade to suit the present.

Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

W. H. Auden used to say, rather pungently, that he could only truly "see" a poem once it's typed because "a man likes his own handwriting the way he likes the smell of his own farts.