Quotes About Revision

#1. I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

Katherine Paterson

#2. While no man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China, and such was never given a thought, the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.

Douglas MacArthur

#3. If you submit an
article to a major refereed clinical journal and it is accepted
upon first submission without a single revision, let me
know and I will take you to dinner the next time you are in
Portland, Oregon.

Robert B. Taylor

#4. There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.

Jonathan Kozol

#5. Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.

George Saunders

#6. Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision

Harry Crews

#7. He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.

William Howard Taft

#8. I reserve the right to evolve. What I think and feel today is subject to revision tomorrow.

Laurence Overmire

#9. Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

Ann Druyan

#10. I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts - I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I used to be able to write 10,000 words a day. It's like, 'Wow, what happened to that?' That's just gone.

Melissa De La Cruz

#11. When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the "You-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" maxim might be more accurate: You cannot be anything you want to be - but you can be a lot more of who you already are.

Tom Rath

#12. Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

John Irving

#13. Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or

Robert Lane Greene

#14. The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.

Russell Kirk

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

Mahatma Gandhi

#16. My YouTube videos have literally millions of views ... Yet I'm still airbrushed out of the BBC Stalinist revision of history; the chart shows have been instructed not to play my music!

Jonathan King

#17. The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it

Fritjof Capra

#18. This, it seems to me, is the lesson of the Bible: this affirmation of the importance of reflection, and of revision, enough revision to do away with the tired, old, even faulty laws.

Chinelo Okparanta

#19. I gave him the name Wiki, because his brain seems to contain as much knowledge as Wikipedia, whereas my revision notes disappear from my memory as fast as a Snapchat.

Zoe Sugg

#20. The dialectical change of mind that occurs in Buddhism is not simply the assimilation of a new philosophical basis or religious basis for viewing and interpreting experience. Rather it is the complete structural revision of that which is.

Frederick Lenz

#21. History only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.

Janet Fitch

#22. Therefore, as you seek to know God, there isn't a need to dabble in lots of different religions or make up one that makes Him more "modern and current." Basically, God's Word needs no revision. And the commandments aren't like the constitution: amending them to fit with the times isn't necessary.

Chantel Hobbs

#23. Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

Jesse Kellerman

#24. The public must retain control of the great waterways. It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and on conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand.

Theodore Roosevelt

#25. My life is constant revision but it's not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.

Robin Ince

#26. Schools of science and physics replacing each other at a faster and faster rate. Just the nature of our world is constant revision, constant ... negation of previous beliefs, and so ... the whole world is a twist ending. Every week is a twist ending.

Chuck Palahniuk

#27. A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Howard Mittelmark

#28. I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

Joyce Carol Oates

#29. I am particularly horrified by the use of propaganda and the manipulation of the truth and the revision of history.

Hillary Clinton

#30. Embrace the melancholic voice completely in the drafting stages, to explore it for all it's worth. Then, in revision, privilege craft over pure feeling. Write the work that someone besides you will want to read.

David Starkey

#31. The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society.

Thurgood Marshall

#32. That's all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It's always open to revision. Yesterday's fact is today's question and tomorrow has an answer we don't know yet.

Elan Mastai

#33. Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

John Dufresne

#34. Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

Patricia Reilly Giff

#35. After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.

Margaret Haddix

#36. Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.

Terry Tempest Williams

#37. The company calls it 'downsizing' or 'rightsizing.' My own informal "Name the Layoff" contest produced some other euphemisms: Retroactive Hiring Freeze, Resume Revision Days, Amway Opportunity Time, and Corporation Lite.

Dale Dauten

#38. Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Siri Hustvedt

#39. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#40. So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.

Edward Hirsch

#41. Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium; it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in the dark.

V.S. Watson

#42. Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.

Richard Branson

#43. Credit ratings and risk weightings must undergo a thorough process of review and revision. No security or instrument on the planet should have a zero risk weighting.

Paul Singer

#44. 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

#45. Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.

Barrett Wendell

#46. I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

#47. Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

Siri Hustvedt

#48. Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in the next work without thinking about it.

Romulus Linney

#49. Your memory has always been given to opportunistic revision.

Dave Eggers

#50. Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power
that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#51. Art has no answers, only solutions, and resolutions... Art has only vision and revision... Art has only hope and more hope... again and again, against circumstance and history... What we hope life might be, again and again, against what we see it has been. In hope, there is a reason to continue.

Israel Horovitz

#52. All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

T.E. Lawrence

#53. The new 'Joy' was needed for a number of reasons. Recent developments in nutrition and new ingredients were two of the major reasons for the revision. One of the other big reasons was America's new love for big flavors. Yay!

Irma S. Rombauer

#54. The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide.

Hilma Wolitzer

#55. This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process-this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and recoveries.

Ellen Gallagher

#56. In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.

Laura Mullen

#57. In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

John Dufresne

#58. Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.

Mary Douglas

#59. Revision is a good impulse to have.

Rigoberto Gonzalez

#60. You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty - done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

Chila Woychik

#61. Revision plays a very large role in writing. Sometimes it seems to be all revision. And the longer I write, the more I revise-until it is completely right.

Ellen Hunnicutt

#62. Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

Benjamin Cardozo

#63. There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain.

Stanislav Grof

#64. Methods and conclusions formed by half the race only, must necessarily require revision as the other half of humanity rises into conscious responsibility.

Elizabeth Blackwell

#65. Walking out of an A level paper isn't funny."
"It's not that I'm laughing at."
"So what is it?"
"No one ever tells you when you're doing all that course work and revision and timed essays and study skills that it's an option."
"But it isn't an option."
"It is, because I just took it.

Rosamund Lupton

#66. I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.

Jamaica Kincaid

#67. Then based on her own recent experience, the Divine Presence had a cruelly perverse sense of humor and His Grand Plan needed drastic revision.

Judith McNaught

#68. Revision is its own reward.

Marianne Moore

#69. The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.

Will Shetterly

#70. It is the Eve of Division; It is the Dawn of Revision. We did not come here to lose. We did not come here to be divided.

Mark Donnelly

#71. I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs.

Mary J. Miller

#72. The revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, undertaken towards the end of the Babylonian exile, a revision much more thorough than is commonly assumed, condemns as heretical the whole age of the Kings.

Julius Wellhausen

#73. 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

#74. If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#75. Like every great writer before or since, Jonson understood that the best poets 'are both made and born'. That all great writing has to be hammered out and all great poets stand or fall by that 'second heat', their laboured revision.

James Shapiro

#76. A novel which has been too much worked over often goes flat, and no amount of laborious revision can take the place of careful planning beforehand.

Sheila Kaye-Smith

#77. All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.

Arthur C. Clarke

#78. The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived.

Noam Chomsky

#79. I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

Dana Spiotta

#80. Students need to be reminded that revision isn't merely making a few cosmetic changes. Revision is seeing and then reseeing our words and practicing strategies that make a difference in our writing.

Georgia Heard

#81. History isn't all fact
it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

Heather Anastasiu

#82. My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Joyce Carol Oates

#83. This assumes an upward revision of the European Budget, which is precisely what Jacques Chirac refuses to do. On the contrary, he has demanded a reduction.

Laurent Fabius

#84. One of the things I like to do during an 'overhaul' revision is bust out my highlighters and colored pens. Tools like these make me feel like a real writer.

Lisa Graff

#85. After all, experiencing something is not the same as remembering it. A memory is by its nature a revision.

Jan Ellison

#86. Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better.

Buffy Andrews

#87. In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

Rita Dove

#88. Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#89. Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

Samuel E. Morison

#90. Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#91. What force is yanking at our sleeves? This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don't even notice. But it's a miracle.

Steven Pressfield

#92. Phases of the creative process: Preparation-gathering impressions Incubation-letting go of certainties Immersion/Illumination-creative intervention/risk Revision-conscious structuring and editing of creative material.

Gail Sheehy

#93. I did a geography degree, and if you told me whilst I was ignoring my geography degree revision in order to watch another episode of '24' that one day I wouldn't need that geography degree and I'd actually be in '24,' I'd have been quite pleased, I think.

Emily Berrington

#94. This revision of the Constitution will not be perfect. But at least the Constitution will not be inflexible. It will be a step towards the Social Europe which we wish.

Laurent Fabius

#95. I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

Cate Marvin

#96. I don't have a schedule, but I can write for hours non-stop. If I'm drafting a book, I try and do a chapter a day. I dislike first drafts. Revision is a lot more fun, but it takes years.

Sefi Atta

#97. All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

Antoni Tapies

#98. A greater persecution shall befall the Christian Church than has ever been in Africa, and will last until the year 1792, when there will be a revision of centuries.

Nostradamus

#99. 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

#100. Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

Vikram Seth