Quotes About Revision

Revision and prediction seem like wastes of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. Here is how the moment instructs me: clouds float in front of the moon's face, lights flicker in the carved heads of pumpkins, leaves rise in the wind at random, saints go nameless, love comforts, souls sing beyond the reach of bodies.

What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.

I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.

I am such a rewriter; I have so many notebooks filled with drafts you wouldn't believe.

When I give notes on a script, I say, 'Guys, I may drift, but it's part of the process.' So I'm aware that I'm drifting, but I'm grabbing a lot of stuff.

I think in my mum's house, I still have my revision notes from my GCSE anthology book!

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

The aim of these gatherings is to acquaint you with the factology of facts. One has to know whether one is dealing with the essential or the circumferential fact. Historical data, after all, tend to be not particularly factual and subject to revision by later researchers. You must look to start, therefore, with the fact that cannot be smashed into sub-particles of fact.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason. —Margaret Atwood

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

and he also told me that I should rethink submitting my thesis. He read your thesis. He read three different drafts of it, actually. Did he understand it? Pretty much. He understood what was wrong with it. And that was? That nobody could understand it.

She and the writer got together to change this story for the better.

Although this poetry collection was first published in 1855, when Whitman was 36 years old, the poet spent his whole life revising the poems in several editions.

Those sentences are somewhat clotted

As to the Adjective: When in doubt, strike it out.

I am a very particular person about having all I write printed as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An intentional change of his text murders him. No wonder so many poets die young!

In writing, you either stick with it and keep revising until it's done, no matter how long it takes — or set it aside a few years until you've distanced yourself enough to get it right. The wait is just as excruciating as the work.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Gaiman wrote the first draft in fountain pen, in several five-hundred-page, leather-bound sketchbooks that he purchased in a close-out sale. "I really wanted a second draft," says the author. "It's my experience with computers that they do not give you a second draft. Computers give you an ongoing, ever-improving first draft.

writing is making a mess, and then working and reworking to create a beautiful piece.

This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.