Top 40 Writing Is Rewriting Quotes
#4. Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
John Casey
#8. 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
#9. Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
Paul Engle
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. [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
#14. For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.
Deborah Eisenberg
#15. 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
#16. Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
Harold Bloom
#17. My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.
Joan Didion
#18. By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.
Roald Dahl
#19. Maybe the key to finding the perfect song is simply rewriting the lyrics.
Kandi Steiner
#20. The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.
Rebecca Stead
#21. 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
#22. There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
Robert Graves
#23. As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.
Robert Hayden
#24. Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.
John Gardner
#27. Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
John Updike
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting - and then, in an instant, it is over,
Hanya Yanagihara
#32. 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
#33. Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
#34. Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
Bret Easton Ellis
#35. Good writing is essentially rewriting.
Roald Dahl
#37. 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
#38. There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.
Susan Bell
#40. Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.
Cathryn Louis
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
