Quotes About Revision

Seeing the first edit is the worst.

I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.

Everybody needs an editor.

Erase everything you have written, Mandelstam says, but keep the notes in the margin.

Your intellect will not remember unless you can refresh it with notes.

One great difference between good writing, that readers overlook, and bad writing, that they fail to notice, has to do with the number of rewrites and revisions usually required by the former. It isn't at all easy to write clear, declarative prose—transparency evolves from ruthless cutting and trimming and is hard work—while lumpy, tangle-footed writing flows from the pen as if inspired by the Muse.

There are many different ways to revise a cookbook. Faced with the task of updating Joy in the mid-1990s, my father, Ethan

The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

Art has no answers, only solutions, and resolutions... Art has only vision and revision... Art has only hope and more hope... again and again, against circumstance and history... What we hope life might be, again and again, against what we see it has been. In hope, there is a reason to continue.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

In 1843 he declared: "I believe the bible, as it ought to be, as it came from the pen of the original writers." He then gave an example of a problematic text that was resolved in his revision of the Old Testament, implying that he had corrected the text to its original reading.11

In revising and expanding the Bible, Smith's procedure was similar to that of an ancient pseudepigraphist who, in the words of one Bible scholar, "created something new, an imaginary Sacred Past, the way it should have been.

used to plan endlessly, but it never made much difference. Everything happens in the actual writing, for me. Now I just live in a book for three years or so. The computer is always on. I make decisions. I revise decisions. The book falls apart. The book comes together in a different way. The new book falls apart. I hold my nerve. The book I start writing—the easy, confident, public book—always turns fraudulent, for me, and I realize that I have

Do the same for flawed design.

Of course, the test difficulty depends on what you're doing, and on how you're doing it. I'm constantly asking "How much would I have to screw this up to write an incorrect function that passes these simple tests?" Occasionally the answer is "Not much," so I'll throw the code away and start over. It was probably perfect code, but that's not good enough.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

Most of us have heard the saying, 'Cleanliness is next to godliness.' That's a sentiment I value, but another virtue has inspired me to revise that saying. As far as I'm concerned, what's next to godliness is resourcefulness.

It is an iterative process that goes something like this: * Screen it * Discuss it * Get the feeling that you don't know what you're doing * Weep openly * Tear it apart * Correct it * Re-board it * Rebuild it * Screen it again * Repeat as necessary

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

E' la storia che ci ha condotto fin qui. Se non fosse per la storia, nessuno di noi oggi sarebbe seduto a questa tavola. Saremmo tranquillamente seduti nella nostra casa di Berlino. Stiamo correggendo la storia, qui.

kill my darlings