Quotes About Revision

I cross things out more than I write them. And if I try to sing a line, and I know that it's written incorrectly, I get this weird sort of physical nausea, and my mouth curls up all strange. I guess that's why I always write the words first: because, if everything feels okay, I'm ready to put it to music.

You know what it's like: you don't want to read your old books again. All you can see are the flaws, what you would do differently.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.

You are sure that I would not be well advised to make certain excisions and eliminations? You do not think it would be a good thing to cut, to prune? I might, for example, delete the rather exhaustive excursus into the family life of the early Assyrians?

Magic happens in the rewrite!

Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.

asesor editorial de esta revisión recibió la difícil tarea de determinar qué partes del material original debían cambiarse. Para ayudarse en el trabajo, les pidió a varios de los maestros de los Cursos de Dale Carnegie que entregaran ejemplares del libro a estudiantes y graduados

Not everything I wrote yesterday appeals to me today.

After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

History," [Voltaire] concludes, "is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead";40 we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot "history proves that anything can be proved by history.

In writing, you must kill your darlings.

Every writer must learn to kill his little darlings.

I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.

If you've used adverbs, look at them carefully. Adverbs are the weakest words; verbs are the strongest. Many, many times I've found that I have the wrong verb so I'm attempting to cheat and modify the wrong verb by using an adverb.

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: 'So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.

I wanted to say, with as much sarcasm as I could put into my voice, "Sir, your poem is both original and interesting, but the part that is interesting is not original, and the part that is original is not interesting." But all I said was, "Not bad, you need to work on it some more.

has been to make each chapter factually accurate, interesting to read, and relevant to readers' lives. In the process, the book has been completely reorganized, updated, and rewritten for this fifth edition. In making these revisions, I have tried to keep in mind that scienc