Quotes About Revision

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

My life needs editing.

Maybe the secret to continued success is as simple as knowing that your past successes could be done so much better now.

It's never too late-in fiction or in life-to revise.

If at first you don't succeed, tweak it before you toss it.

that the new opportunities for learning require us to articulate a fundamental revision of the value of school and the roles of teachers and classrooms. The

If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

Why should the Bible, which the centuries have been unable to shake, be discarded for scientific works that have to be corrected and revised every few years?

Vigorous writing is concise.

Someone might ask, if the dynamic of innovation consists of schema and revision, where does true originality come from? Is there no single work we can point to as the ultimate source of this or that new storrytelling strategy? I'm inclined to say there is no such source. Artists working in mass art forms find originality by revising schemas in circulation, or by revising ones that have fallen into disuse.

If you're a perfectionist about your writing, [your rough draft] is the time to get over it. . . . Decide ahead of time that your rough draft is going to be pretty awful, and join the ranks of the great writers of the world. . . . Save the niceties for the revision stage.

Editors and agents have an uncanny ability to zero in on the very thing you knew—but didn't want to admit—was wrong with your proposal or manuscript.

This is our story, and we're not sticking to it.

This edition of The Making of a Quagmire differs in a number of ways from the original one. Approximately one-third of the text has been cut in an effort to eliminate material that seemed clearly redundant or that did not relate directly to the Vietnam war.

It's the very essence of science that its conclusions can change, that is, that its truths are not absolute. The intrinsic good sense of this is contained within the remark reportedly made by the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes, responding to the criticism that he had changed his position on monetary policy during the 1930s Depression: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

He had finished and collected the three years of drafts [of Infinite Jest] , and finally sat down and typed the whole thing. Wallace didn't really type; he input the giant thing twice, with one finger. "But a really fast finger.

God Himself has reserved no right of revision of His own laws nor is there any need for Him for any such revision.

There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite

Good writing is essentially rewriting.