Top 76 Quotes About 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

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#5. Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

Margaret Haddix

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#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

Quotes About Revising #373758
#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

Quotes About Revising #388532
#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

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#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

Quotes About Revising #451631
#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

Quotes About Revising #488905
#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

Quotes About Revising #496790
#16. I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

Chaim Potok

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#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

Quotes About Revising #520532
#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

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#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

Quotes About Revising #597196
#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

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#21. I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

Joyce Carol Oates

Quotes About Revising #623377
#22. Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

Don Roff

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#23. Our past is a novel that we are constantly revising.

Eric G. Wilson

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#29. I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.

Ariel Pink

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#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

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#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

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#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

Quotes About Revising #814227
#33. There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.

Robert Lane Greene

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#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

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#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

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#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

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#37. I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.

John Dufresne

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#38. I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.

Gail Carson Levine

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#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

Quotes About Revising #945700
#40. I'm constantly revising and updating a piece until it's finally recorded. Once it's recorded, then it's over.

Glenn Branca

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#41. It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions ... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

Bridget Riley

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#42. When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn't any reclaiming it or revising it.

Gregory Maguire

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#43. 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

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#44. Doing a movie of one of the Raksura books would involve a lot of CGI, but I have thought about who I'd like to play the characters. Some of them I just can't pin down to a specific actor, and I keep revising my mental list.

Martha Wells

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#45. Having a blood family means suddenly revising a definition of family that I have, over many years, learned to accept. How can I hold both concepts in my mind or find room for both families in my heart?

Soojung Jo

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#46. When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.

Don Roff

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#47. 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.

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#48. Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

Patricia Fuller

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#49. Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.

Matt De La Pena

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#50. Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears.

Elizabeth McCracken

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#51. I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I'm constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.

Maria Semple

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#52. Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down
revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

Erica Jong

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#53. I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.

Megan McCafferty

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#54. The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.

Danielle Steel

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#55. 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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#56. Growth has no limit at Reliance. I keep revising my vision. Only when you dream it you can do it.

Dhirubhai Ambani

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#57. Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

Ted Solotaroff

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#58. I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.

Chang-rae Lee

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#59. I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.

Sara Shepard

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#60. Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.

Stephen King

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#61. The monsoon came, six months
of infinite rain. The towns I once knew
were wiped clean,
and everyone said it was God
revising his poem.

Eric Gamalinda

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#62. Never think of revising as fixing something that is wrong. That starts you off in a negative frame of mind. Rather think of it as an opportunity to improve something you already love.

Marion Dane Bauer

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#63. If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.

Michael Ian Black

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#64. I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony.

Sherman Alexie

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#65. I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good."--Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo

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#66. I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Chaim Potok

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#67. The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

Susan Stewart

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#68. I have always had a hard time revising my work as a journalist, which was never much of a problem. You always have editors as backstops. Their job is to perfect your story. Most of them want to be useful.

Jon Weisman

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#69. I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Joyce Carol Oates

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#70. For me, intuition comes from experience. After years of experience, a person will have, if they have been paying attention and revising their thinking and behavior, intuitions about their area of experience.

Charles Faulkner

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#71. Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad.

Lee Child

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#72. During the day, if I don't have any other commitments, I'm usually at my desk writing, revising, or researching anywhere from four to six hours.

Gail Tsukiyama

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#73. Revising while you generate text is like drinking decaffeinated coffee in the early morning: noble idea, wrong time.

Paul J. Silvia

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#74. The only creative force capable of causally revising your experienced reality is your power to change your Self.

Thomas Daniel Nehrer

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#75. I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

Dean Koontz

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#76. Revising a screenplay is much more frustrating than revising a song because you have to read through the entire work again while you are changing stuff. It is a lot easier to edit a song.

Kelly Jones

Quotes About Revising #1877938

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