Quotes About Revision

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

Almost always, shortening a sentence improves it. A nice short sentence feels like something has been left out, which helps give it the element of surprise.

I'm dissatisfied with every record the Beatles ever f***ing made. There ain't one of them I wouldn't remake.

Babel werd nooit moe zijn verhalen te herschrijven. Hij zei dat er in een volzin ergens een soort hefboompje zat waarop je de hand kon leggen om er een heel kleine, maar precies goede draai mee te geven, niet te veel, niet te weinig, waarna alles op zijn plaats viel.

The copy editor looks for inconsistencies in content (does your character have blue eyes in Chapter 1, and green eyes in Chapter 30?

My preferred method is to be able to suggest a concept and get two preliminary sketches or renderings. Then choose one and have two rounds of modifications and a final polish.

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.

Beauty is revealed through the art of revision—whether one is revising a perfume, a dress Ã¢â'¬Â¦ or life itself. —DB

PROOFREADER'S MARKS

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.

history only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.

I had operations up until I was 18, then revision on my scars to put back my eyebrows. So I've had a lot of what is called plastic surgery. And I have huge, huge respect for what that is.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

Trump would have us revise and edit our historical memory of 9/11, turning it from a unifying narrative of heroism, tragedy, and war and recast it to serve the political ends of a man unworthy of the presidency.

I was having a lot of people ask me to update 'The Shock Doctrine' and add a chapter about Trump.

If I feel like something needs to be updated, I'll break my neck to outdo the original.

There are always people screeching and upset that I did this or didn't do that. Basically, they're upset that I didn't rewrite an earlier book they particularly liked.

The upward revision of import duty, from 1 per cent to over 4 per cent on steam coal imports, will adversely impact the industry, as it will lead to increase in cost of power generation.

This assumes an upward revision of the European Budget, which is precisely what Jacques Chirac refuses to do. On the contrary, he has demanded a reduction.

Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one's own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away.

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.