Quotes About Revision

The people who are always monkeying with these great books to make them fully (comprehensible) have no friend in me, for in their realm the fully comprehensible is not worth comprehending

You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.

The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.

I wanted to do that again but, when I went to look for chants, I didn't want to do it in the exact same way.

What really excites me is the production. I get in there and change a lot of stuff.

After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, 'It's been Normanized.'

'It could be better' is the only thing that anyone should write in the margins of their own script.

We have to change truth a little in order to remember it.

Some people think of editing as the physical act of cutting," Hirsch says. "But that's a misconception. The French use the word montage for editing, which means 'to build.' And I think that is a more precise description.

once in a meeting about our written reports. "When you guys finish your shows, take that file and throw it out. Do not keep one piece of paper, because next year when we have to come back and do this again, it will force you to rethink everything you did, not just pick up from where you left off and implement the same procedures and production elements that you did last year.

It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one's own needs.

Escrevo sem pensar tudo o que meu inconsciente grita. Penso depois: não só para corrigir, mas para justificar o que escrevi.

Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.

Half my life is an act of revision.

But you don't see with hindsight in a first draft. You have to finish the first draft to see what you've missed.

If we sometimes recast problems before we begin, more often we revise our specification in the process of actually tackling them.

Information is fleeting. Human records are broken; new particles are discovered; fresh historical documents come to light. Dinosaurs turn out not to be giant grey iguanas after all, but multicoloured feathery proto-birds of all shapes and sizes. Right now, even the daddy of all facts, the Big Bang theory, is looking wobbly.

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

With ardent sadness he contemplated the scene of his death for a long time, endlessly revising it like a work of art and surrounding it with images of this world, images that still imbued his thoughts, but that, already slipping away from him in his gradual departure, became vague and beautiful.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material…..

At the end of the day before you sleep, Life should ask you: 'Do you want to save changes?'