Quotes About Revision

Originally, 'The Windup Girl' started as a short story - a very gnarly, complicated short story set in Bangkok that didn't work very well.

I don't really outline. I just kind of know where I'm going in my head, so I'll write and discover it for myself. Or I'll just write an entire episode and throw it out because I land on an idea and realize that's where I should jump off from.

I would not go so far as to say that we are completely changing our outlook.

I was a Thatcherite. But to be fair, I probably have changed my outlook.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

I look at the plotline and let my co-author basically write the book; first draft. Then they give it to me, and I totally destroy it and write all my stuff over it.

Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.

If the story wasn't overly long, I'd type it out. And I'd carry it around with me for a week and jot notes on it, and then I'd throw it away and do another one.

Thank God for white paint because many of my paintings have paintings underneath them because I'm a perfectionist and if I don't like my art I'm pretty sure no one else will.

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.

It's good to vandalize one's own work.

You don't propose marriage after one date. You don't decide on a career after one article or class session. You don't cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading.

Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision.

If I go back to the beginning, I could start it over again. I could go line by line; try and find a shorter way. I could try to make it... better.

From a personal standpoint, in my fifty years of serious study of the Bible, obviously I have had to revise my own perspectives on a number of occasions. However

a poem is never finished, only abandoned,

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

The past changes a little every time we retell it.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Hilary Mantel

And let's debunk one bit of writer myth while we're here: Doing a seventeenth revision on a project does not make a writer an artist or move him above the writer hoi polloi any more than dressing entirely in black or wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or big, black drover coats. These are all affectations, and smack of dilettantism. Real writers, and real artists, finish books and move on to the next project.