Quotes About Revision

If you do an original film and you want to cut a scene out you do it. But when you do a shot by shot remake you don't have that option and every scene has to work again.

If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.

Sometimes I look at some of my old work and I don't like it.

The worst thing you can do is animate something, and then throw it out because it doesn't work, story wise.

The Canadian painter A. Y. Jackson noted that 'failure of sight' was a tiresome problem. He meant we should be able to look at our work-in-progress as if it were previously unseen.

Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in the next work without thinking about it.

The lion's share of my work is revision, 85%? I revise forever, combing over lines, listening and listening to them in different hours and moods so that I feel they are finally right for me.

One good thing the teaching has given me is the ability to read and revise my own work.

I've been working, working, working, and you know, sometimes you look back at your work and you see that it just isn't any good.

The nice thing about the theatre is you can always change it. With a movie, once it's there, you're stuck with it.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.

You're looking for the best way of shooting it, but sometimes the best way of shooting it is changing the script.

When the facts change, I change my mind.

The action plan is a statement of intentions rather than a commitment. It must not become a straitjacket. It should be revised often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

That's the thing about life and love - every time you take another look at them, there's something else that can be revised.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't—I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere—but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.

If you write a phrase and think, 'Wow, that's really poetic, that's really pretty, I really nailed it,' you get rid of it [because] you've overdone it.

In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first twenty pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first twenty pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

To adapt a play into a movie, you have to change it.