Top 100 Quotes About Rewriting
#1. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
Terry Pratchett
#2. Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.
Cathryn Louis
#3. By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.
Dan Brown
#4. I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
David McCullough
#5. The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
Saul Bellow
#6. Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
Tom Stoppard
#8. I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.
Jim Gaffigan
#9. Growing up like rewriting is simply admitting how clueless you were not so long ago.
Scott Westerfeld
#10. Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.
Larry L. King
#11. The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell
#12. I get ill when I'm writing because I'm so focused on it, and it can take a year or two. Often, I knock out the first draft very quickly. I can do it in five to six weeks. Then, it takes a year of rewriting it and rewriting it.
Eran Creevy
#13. I marveled a bit at the feat Lubianka re-education. I also began to understand more clearly what was meant by rewriting history for the proletariat and how it could be arranged that young people would hear nothing whatsoever of God.
Walter Ciszek
#14. During improvisations, I'll hear people bringing back up details from something I heard about at breakfast or something somebody was saying that they were thinking about, and it informs a rewriting of a scene.
Joe Swanberg
#16. This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted.
Susanna Kaysen
#17. Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story.
Roberta Gellis
#18. No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for Before Coffee.
Cherise Sinclair
#19. The New York Times, whose editorial department sounds like Cotton Mather rewriting Eleanor Roosevelt ...
William F. Buckley Jr.
#20. Should we be rewriting history just to make people feel good? That's not history, that's psychiatry.
Ed Koch
#22. There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.
Susan Bell
#23. 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
#24. But I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.
Patrick DeWitt
#25. I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.
Caroline Leavitt
#27. True love is a fairy tale, which can be transformed into reality by rewriting each chapter by hearing the whispers of each other's heart, by believing in those whispers and absorbing the aches that lie within.
Balroop Singh
#28. That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.
Tim Tharp
#29. Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn.
Jami Attenberg
#30. Making all of those words work together is difficult. It took a lot of cleaning up, a lot of rewriting scenes in order to make them more vivid. I used everything - every oddity I've ever seen on the side of the road, every interesting memory I could make relevant.
Mary J. Miller
#31. I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.
Kate DiCamillo
#32. The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.
Rose Tremain
#34. Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they're writing fluently doesn't mean they're writing well.
William Zinsser
#35. Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for the book
reportedly the most anyone has ever received for rewriting history.
Ann Coulter
#36. Good writing is essentially rewriting.
Roald Dahl
#37. In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
James Patterson
#38. On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.
Alan Moore
#39. Writing is rewriting... If you fall in love with the vision you want of your work and not your words, the rewriting will become easier.
Nora DeLoach
#40. Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.
Elizabeth Strout
#41. Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
Bret Easton Ellis
#42. Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun!
Kristen McKee
#44. Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.
Robert McKee
#45. Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.
Matt Hughes
#46. Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming.
Bill Gates
#47. Don't be so caught up in the noble cause of responsibility that you lose your passion for who you are living for.
Shannon L. Alder
#48. We're the new power, come to replace the old. Cameras in the head, children with microchips, spin doctors rewriting reality as it happens.
Grant Morrison
#49. I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow.
Neil Gaiman
#50. Sophie Kruger had worked in a house herself, up in Middle Swan. But now she pretended she was quality. There were none so self-righteous as those who rewrote their past.
Sandra Dallas
#51. What Tengo would have to do, it seemed, was take a hard, honest look at the past while standing at the crossroads of the present. Then he could create a future, as thought he were rewriting the past.It was the only way
Haruki Murakami
#52. And after you've done the acting, there's a lot of places you can put your input - in the editing, in the production of it, in the rewriting of it and so on.
Paul Reiser
#53. I'm not against thinking; I'm only against thinking that thinking on its own will get you out of a hole. Shovel also needed.
Scott Westerfeld
#54. We are redefining terms and rewriting laws and removing fences everywhere you turn, and we seem to think we can do that with impunity.
Ravi Zacharias
#55. You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it.
Ray Bradbury
#56. I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.
Leo Tolstoy
#57. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
Philip Roth
#58. That rewriting of literary history is most obvious in the case of The Yage Letters, where I was able to show that the true history inverts the official one.
Oliver Harris
#59. Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.
Richard North Patterson
#60. Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
#61. Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
Paul Engle
#62. I rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.
Wendelin Van Draanen
#63. I can't go back to what we had in childhood. I can't relive those times, retrace my tracks and undo what's been done. It's not like writing a book and rewriting the ending to make it happier.
Patti Callahan Henry
#64. Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#65. Within each of us, there lies the innate ability to survive, triumph, and overcome, rewriting the scripts of our own lives, having some power over our fate and the fate of generations to come. Nothing has to be 'just because that's the way it's always been.' -The Boots My Mother Gave Me
Brooklyn James
#66. Interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting - and then, in an instant, it is over,
Hanya Yanagihara
#68. When we are in pre-production, this is the best job in the world. Working 10 to 7, sitting around and brainstorming with the other writers, making things funnier and writing and rewriting scenes - that's as fun as it gets.
Paul Lieberstein
#69. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
Jonathan Lethem
#70. If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.
William James
#71. When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot.
Ruggero Leoncavallo
#73. True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.
Alexandre Dumas
#74. Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that.
Lynne Tillman
#75. Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun ... In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.
Neil Simon
#76. Heinlein's Rules for Writers
Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
Robert A. Heinlein
#77. History is the torch that is meant to illuminate the past, to guard us against the repetition of our mistakes of other days. We cannot join in the rewriting of history to make it conform to our comfort and convenience.
Claude Bowers
#78. I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.
Tony Gilroy
#79. Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.
Kurt Loder
#80. Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
John Updike
#81. Any attentive reading is necessarily a kind of rewriting.
Thierry Hentsch
#82. Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well.
William Zinsser
#84. [Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.
Rachel Carson
#85. I feel the most natural thing is for music to come that way because it's sort of like poetry. Though I do think with poets that I like, like Charles Olson or Ezra Pound, they were rewriting constantly, until the poem becomes a diamond.But with music I don't really feel that way.
Stephen Malkmus
#86. Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.
Tom Stoppard
#87. Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#88. Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.
Jonathan Franzen
#89. There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was "bad",
Her Papa loved her anyway.
Kristen McKee
#90. [Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship.
Sam Shepard
#91. Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.
Jimmy Webb
#92. I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.
Laura Marling
#93. The president is supposed to execute faithfully the laws that the legislature has written. So, the executive orders that Barack Obama president is writing are without precedent. Without precedent so with he's rewriting law. It's totally illegal.
Rafael Cruz
#94. When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.
Philip Roth
#95. Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act's limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.
Antonin Scalia
#96. I was tired of rewriting my opinion of the Society. I was tired of wondering what Rose would wish me to do. I was tired of constantly wondering if I had made the right choice, if I even had a choice, or if I was being manipulated at every turn.
Tarun Shanker
#97. There are three primal urges in human beings: food, sex, and rewriting some else's play.
Romulus Linney
#98. The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting ... Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur.
Sol Stein
#99. GREAT THINGS sometimes come from rewriting under pressure.
Lynn Hunt
#100. Rewriting the negative beliefs you have learned is the essence of becoming the director of your life.
Deborah Day
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