Quotes About Revision

Opinions are made to be changed - or how is the truth to be got at.

or amended and saved at 1:08 p.m. that afternoon

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

These suggestions are only preliminary. A statistician on the job will of course modify and revise them to suit his own inclinations and local conditions.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

I still write with pen and paper and have someone type it on a computer. But rewriting I do by hand.

Fuzzy thinking can never be proven wrong. And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast, measure, revise: it is the surest path to seeing better.

Precise sentences were my ideals, though in practice I was slipshod and sentimental. I began to seek a balance between improvisation and revision.

Polishing: a useful lesson for the hopeful writer. You say your tormented prose doesn't read as well as mine? Neither does mine, at first!

Hacks didn't destroy, they just...creatively amended.

Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually means many, many revisions.

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

Every word I have written took the wrong approach. I

If you can't look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it's there—take it out or change it.

You have to constantly work on your script if it needs it. You don't accept, 'Oh, I did a draft and...' No, it's your responsibility to work on the script as much as possible and make it better and better.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.

I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

I don't like writing - it's so difficult to say what you mean. It's much easier to edit other people's writing and help them say what they mean.