Quotes About Revision

There is no such thing as Frankenstein, there are only Frankensteins, as the text is ceaselessly rewritten, reproduced, refilled and redesigned

They're constants, aren't they?" ... "Books are. That's why we like them so much. They seem immutable. They're not, of course. Not from the author's first draft to the tenth printing, but they seem like it.

Those who cannot understand what they've read should probably reread it.

A book is never finished; it's abandoned.

I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.

En cierta obra de un hombre célebre preferiría leer lo que tachó que lo que dejó.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

Credit ratings and risk weightings must undergo a thorough process of review and revision. No security or instrument on the planet should have a zero risk weighting.

The backbone of any improvement of governance, its development as well as its protection from any form of wastage or excessiveness, is a mechanism to place laws under the microscope of revision and modernization until they resonate in tune with the methodological development and new administrative technologies.

I listen to my songs so many times that I tend to lose objectivity. After I hear a tune around 30 times, I keep it aside, and revisit it after a while. Then, it starts sounding fresh again.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.

I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

I draft tweets, like, 20 times.

If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.

I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it's my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it 'first' and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, 'You've passed your deadline.'

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.

Sometimes I want to go into Saturday Night Live and rewrite some of the sketches because they're really not that good.