Top 42 Quotes About Not Revising
#1. I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.
Claudia Rankine
#2. I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.
John Dos Passos
#3. Most philosophies wrap their seekers in a strict belief system. By virtue of what they include, they exclude everything else, especially some vital realizations. Periodically revising our philosophy of life as we live it is, therefore, a critically valuable exercise.
Charles Bates
#4. I listen to a lot of different stuff, from Mozart to Johnny Dowd to Monster Magnet. I don't listen to music while I'm writing a draft, but I do listen to it when I'm revising.
Donald Ray Pollock
#5. Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.
Margaret Haddix
#6. Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.
Lee Gutkind
#7. You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.
Fran Sorin
#8. One of Cranmer's goals in writing and revising the Book of Common Prayer was to get Scripture into the ears of the people so that their hearts might be turned to God and their lives transformed by his love. Cranmer
Michael Jensen
#9. But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.
Robert Anton Wilson
#10. As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.
Haruki Murakami
#11. I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.
Sefi Atta
#12. I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.
Dean Koontz
#13. 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.
J.K. Rowling
#14. First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it ... Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
#15. But as of late, I have been consumed with the significant task of revising the latest edition of my Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, while alternately putting the finishing touches on my four volumes of The Whole Art of Detection. The latter is a rather tedious, labyrinthine undertaking ...
Mitch Cullin
#16. I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.
Chaim Potok
#17. Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.
Don Roff
#18. The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.
David Rakoff
#19. I thought of the idea of Summly in March or April 2011. I was 15 years old and I was revising for some kind of history exam. The problem was I was trying to find information that was useful to me. When you type into Google an esoteric term, you get quite a lot of stuff that's not relevant.
Nick D'Aloisio
#20. 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.
Marcel Proust
#22. Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.
Don Roff
#23. Our past is a novel that we are constantly revising.
Eric G. Wilson
#24. When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.
Lynn Coady
#25. I personally am a 'discovery writer,' as we're termed, someone who plans the book by writing it and then revising the entire thing. When it comes to saga, this means writing large chunks of prose before any of it coalesces into a book.
Katharine Kerr
#26. I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct
a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice.
Virgil Suarez
#27. One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.
May Sarton
#28. The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It's myth making.
Li-Young Lee
#29. I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.
Ariel Pink
#30. From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I'm now my thoughts and not I
Fernando Pessoa
#31. Knowing someone is the first goal of therapy. Modulating emotionality - whether by relatedness or psychopharmacology or both - is second. Therapy's last and most ambitious aim is revising the neural code that directs an emotional life. (176)
Thomas Lewis
#32. Practicality requires that we stop somewhere in the process, but nothing actually says we can't keep on writing and revising. In fact, most writers continue to develop ideas and themes from one book to the next in what is essentially a lifelong evolution and revision.
Ralph L. Wahlstrom
#33. There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.
Robert Lane Greene
#34. She turned for her kitchen, mentally revising her planned family dinner to include a Vor lord from the Imperial capital. White wine? Her limited experience of the breed suggested that if you could get them sufficiently sloshed, it wouldn't matter what you fed them.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#35. The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.
Jeff Bezos
#36. When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.
Stephen King
#37. I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne
#38. I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.
Gail Carson Levine
#39. Despite the best of intentions, people create rules variously and often in reaction to behaviors deemed unacceptable to the larger goals of the group. That is why we often find ourselves revising the rules when new conditions reveal their loopholes.
Dov Seidman
#40. Men have jobs, while women have Roles: Mother, Wife, Goddess, Temptress, etc. That's probably why it's so hard for women to rewrite the rules. You're not just changing a job description, but an ancient myth. You're revising the Bible, Poetry, Legend and Psychoanalytic Scripture.
Caryl Rivers
#41. Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons ... Good writing means good revising.
William Strunk Jr.
#42. If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.
Francine Prose
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