Quotes About Revision

Hard writing makes easy reading.

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

I change over time and my perception of the poem also changes, hence endless revision. I sometimes worry that I spend more time revising than writing new poems.

It must have been the case that the natural language, Prakrit, and the vernaculars came first, while Sanskrit, the refined, secondary revision, the artificial language, came later.

Indeed, there were more blank spots on the canvas than those covered with pigment. Gabriel effectively had to repaint the entire work, incorporating the small

The function of the first draft is to help you figure out your story. The function of every draft after that is to figure out the most dramatic way to tell that story.

decided that good scholarship demanded taking the losers' point of view, and that made the revision of claims about historic fact inevitable.

You can always improve on something, the technology is different today, but I would leave it well alone. If there was something that was incomplete, that might be interesting... because I do that on my website.

Ironically, the internal version number of Windows 7 is version 6.1,[1] which implies that Microsoft considers its newest operating system to be a (relatively) minor revision of Windows Vista (version 6.0).

The theological denigration of women was a major revision of the assumptions that had informed the Christian movement from the gospels forward. Jesus himself modeled an egalitarian respect toward women: In Christ, 'there is neither male nor female.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what is will be tomorrow

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

Write like you're in love. Edit like you're in charge.

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing." —

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

people are never like what you remember them. You make them, as the years go by, more and more the way you wish them to be, and as you think you remember them. If you want to remember them as agreeable and gay and handsome, you make them far more so than they actually were.

Not all traditions hold up over time.

Amateurs try to write in one go; professionals draft and draft again.

The thing with 'Peter Pan' is it's been done so well so many times.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.