Draft Quotes

#1. To me, nothing tastes more like summer than peach pie. I began collecting pie recipes from friends and family while I was still working on my first draft. As the recipes poured in, it was fun to try to match the pies to the characters in the book.

Sarah Weeks

#2. When my husband first read a draft, he said, "You spend too much time describing the characters' outfits." He was right. I removed much of the clothes talk, but quite a bit remained.

Heidi Julavits

#3. A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Patricia Hampl

#4. NRDC has helped bring hope spots to more of our shared ocean waters. We helped draft and pass a California law creating a network of underwater parks stretching from the Oregon border to the Mexican border.

Frances Beinecke

#5. I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.

Gore Vidal

#6. We have an incredible national forest service, and we have an incredible child outreach program that the president has put together. I don't see anything wrong with national service for a minimum of two years. If we were to require that, we wouldn't need a draft.

Montel Williams

#7. Remember--Adam was only God's rough draft, but Eve was his masterpiece.

Sam Torode

#8. More and more teams are using almost exclusively the draft to build their teams. And that means you have younger players to develop in those key depth positions. Younger players are more susceptible to streaks than veterans. They go up, they go down.

Ozzie Newsome

#9. Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

Colleen McCullough

#10. I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

Radhanath Swami

#11. Every creative person can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace.

Edwin Catmull

#12. The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

Jean De La Bruyere

#13. Coming out of college into the draft, being Asian-American and being from Harvard, that's not going to be an advantage because of stereotypes.

Jeremy Lin

#14. You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

James A. Michener

#15. Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.

Lorrie Moore

#16. In 2007, when I was a lawyer for the public interest group Free Press, I helped draft the complaint to the FCC against Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent and other technologies.

Marvin Ammori

#17. I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.

Louis MacNeice

#18. I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.

George Stephen

#19. As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body

Thomas Hobbes

#20. If journalism is the first draft of history, then talk radio provides an early glimpse into how the meaning of political events will be spun for ideological and partisan purposes.

Jackson Katz

#21. I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream.

Haruki Murakami

#22. Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have a stake in the wars we fight as a nation.

Charles B. Rangel

#23. A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

James A. Owen

#24. I had written in another draft a completely different kind of fight, but they said they couldn't afford to shoot it. They needed a fight scene, though, so I was told to put a fight scene in, but not the one I had written.

Dana Carvey

#25. Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

Rose Tremain

#26. A lot of teams made a mistake in the NBA draft.

Josh Howard

#27. Sure God created man before woman, but then again you always make a rough draft before creating the final masterpiece.

Robert Bloch

#28. I do first draft in longhand, which saves a lot of rewriting. I try to get a certain amount done each day. Don't always, but I try. Then I clean up in the rewrites.

Harry Turtledove

#29. I'll play a character who is getting married to a woman to avoid the draft. Ultimately they fall in love with each other, but at first it's only out of practicality.

Elijah Wood

#30. (The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.)

Matt Haig

#31. In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.

Charlie Savage

#32. The first draft of a story is the writer's clay.

Bruce Coville

#33. Nothing moves around, it just goes straight from the start to the end. The final draft on the final day, that's it, same for the novels. What I turn in is what you see. There are some exceptions, but almost always I can see exactly what it's going to be.

T.C. Boyle

#34. Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath Conviction's roof. Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weatherproof. But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind, For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind.

Phyllis McGinley

#35. I revise a lot while I'm drafting, often going back to the beginning again and again to revise because I've changed massive things about the story. By the time I get to the end of a first draft, I've been through the beginning lots of times.

Holly Black

#36. I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.

Cynthia Ozick

#37. For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce.
... how to set yourself spinning?

Annie Dillard

#38. The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.

Miriam Toews

#39. The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace.

Al Franken

#40. At sixteen I get drafted. When I read the draft notice, I cry. Not because I'm a coward - I'm not afraid of anyone. But I don't want to kill or be killed.

Klaus Kinski

#41. ASTROLOGY PREDICTIVE FORE GLANCE KNOW-HOW LIGHT FLASH IS NEEDED TO ALL HUMANS IN THIS MODERN CENTURY TO UNVEIL THE SECRETS OF GOD UNIVERSE FUTURE DIVINE DRAFT.SO,RESEARCH IN ASTROLOGY HAS TO BE DEMANDED ON AROUND THE GLOBE TO HAVE GRIP ON SOUL FACING NEXT MICRO SECOND.

Various

#42. Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.

Tom Verlaine

#43. It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven.

Dorothy Parker

#44. My philosophy is that you don't motivate players with speeches; you have motivated players that you draft. That's where they come in, and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.

Phil Jackson

#45. There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

Heidi Julavits

#46. I draft on the computer. I have a really giant screen that attaches to my laptop, and then I have a humongous digital drawing tablet called a Cintiq. It sits at all different angles, and it's so big that it would take two people to move it.

Jeff Kinney

#47. It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

Amos Oz

#48. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.

Peter Carey

#49. History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised.
The Confessions are Augustine's own first draft of history.

James O'Donnell

#50. I was halfway through a rough draft of 'The Sisters Brothers' when it came time to start the 'Terri' adaptation.

Patrick DeWitt

#51. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. ... "Built-in" does not mean unmalleable; it means "organized in advance of experience."3

Jonathan Haidt

#52. His third-floor bedroom wasn't an all-American room. It was an all-English room, lacking only a three-pronged outlet and a draft.

Peter Smith

#53. My first draft is usually how I meant it, but my second and third drafts is how I want to be understood.

Selena Haskins

#54. I have no preferred team, but everyone wants to go No. 1 in the draft. Even the guy who gets picked last in the draft wants to go No. 1. But I just know that whoever picks me, I'm going to be excited to play for that team, and I can't wait to see myself in 'Madden' on that team.

Robert Griffin III

#55. Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community's own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe.

Ian Kershaw

#56. So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.

Molly Antopol

#57. The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.

Christos Tsiolkas

#58. Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

Nicholas Sparks

#59. Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Joyce Carol Oates

#60. You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.

Sean Connery

#61. The truth shall set you free...unless of course you live anywhere w/vengeful, powerful people and/or government - John: First Draft

Grea Alexander

#62. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

George Carlin

#63. If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

Maxine Kumin

#64. I mean, if I went into my closet, I could find a previous draft and try to figure that out, but it takes a long time for me to find the voice to tell a story in. I was working from other points of view for a couple years there.

Alice Sebold

#65. Money ... is only important when you have none; and though it may not be everything, it goes a very long way towards blocking up the winter draft of age.

Caitlin Thomas

#66. I think the biggest thing for me now is that I have a better understanding of what to expect as far as things go and the scheduling. Your first year is a little crazy because you are preparing for the draft and don't know where you will be playing.

Giovani Bernard

#67. I heard there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft.

George W. Bush

#68. It's a proclamation he regards as complete absolution from answering ... as if his last name was Bush, he was eighteen, and there was a draft going on.

Laurie Notaro

#69. Jenks made a face. He turned my son into a thief and broke my partner's heart. Why should I give him a draft of consideration?

Kim Harrison

#70. First of all, I want to thank the Buccaneers for giving me the opportunity and for picking me in the draft. This is the nature of the beast, though, and this is a new start for me. I wish them the best of luck, and I am just glad to be a Bear.

Gaines Adams

#71. They're constants, aren't they?" ... "Books are. That's why we like them so much. They seem immutable. They're not, of course. Not from the author's first draft to the tenth printing, but they seem like it.

C.E. Murphy

#72. I have always been thankful that so many of our country's greatest leaders and statesmen were able to be on this earth at the same time and place to draft the Constitution.

Bob Latta

#73. If you like a football team, you watch their games.
If you like football, you watch all the games.
If you love football, you watch the draft.
If you can't get enough football, you watch the combine.

T.C. Slonaker

#74. I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be.

Michael Showalter

#75. There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.

Dean Koontz

#76. I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

Nora Roberts

#77. To my parents and all the people who reassured me that leaving high school and going into the draft was the right thing to do, I am forever thankful.

Jeremy Bonderman

#78. I can be in the NFL as long as any other back. I went late in the draft because no one thought I could do it.

Brandon Jacobs

#79. A draft doesn't produce the people we need to satisfy our real manpower shortage. We need specialists to keep our jets flying.

Patricia Schroeder

#80. Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.

Margaret Atwood

#81. Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.

Chuck Wendig

#82. I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.

Tim O'Brien

#83. I had finished the first draft of 'Life As We Knew It' before Katrina hit, and it was startling to see things I wrote about actually happening in the real world.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

#84. The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.

John Barton

#85. Life is a first draft ... with NO rewrite.

George Bernard Shaw

#86. Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

Bruce Boxleitner

#87. The privatization law draft was recently released and I believe that very soon we will start applying it, of course taking into consideration the provisions of UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo).

Ibrahim Rugova

#88. You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.

William Monahan

#89. I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

Stephen Collins

#90. There is no such thing as a publishable first draft.

William Targ

#91. Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.

Guy Garvey

#92. Which I would've done 'cause I volunteered for the draft which meant that I only had to do two years. But when the Cubans had missiles in the Canal and Kennedy made the extension, I was one of the ones who had enough time to be extended.

Edwin Starr

#93. It's important to put aside your internal editor and just get words down on the page when working on a first draft.

S.J. Scott

#94. I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story.

Isabel Allende

#95. Shouldn't we carry on living the same way until the last, because that is what vexes death the most - to see us drinking life to the final draft?

Nina George

#96. Independence is a heady draft, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.

Maya Angelou

#97. In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.

Joe Klein

#98. The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.

James Rado

#99. Presidential Democratic front-runner Howard Dean admitted to Chris Matthews on the 'Hardball' show that he got out of the draft because of a bad back. He had a curvature of the spine. Apparently it curved too far to the left.

Jay Leno

#100. I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.

John Irving