Quotes About Revision

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

There's a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death." —Toni Morrison

I've seen too many writers derail their creative process by stopping the action to tweak a word or a sentence. If you write a few paragraphs, then go back and polish them, you destroy all the forward momentum you had. It's like shifting gears—forward, reverse, forward, reverse. You could burn out your mental transmission. If you can train yourself to save the criticism for the second draft, you'll actually finish writing and have something to polish.

Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick.

In any medium, I also start out assuming—even planning—that I'll delete the first thing I do, whether it's a paragraph or the first few rows of a scarf. That makes those first steps far less precious and therefore less intimidating.

Scientific answers are not definitive: they are, almost by definition, the best ones that we have at any given time. Consider

the only manuscripts in her entire career that had required no editing, "no repeat absolutely no editorial suggestions from me or anyone else," were Wilder's and E. B. White's.

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If, in the first chapter, you say there is a gun hanging on the wall, you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

Your book is bloated and self-indulgent