Writing Revision Quotes

#1. Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Tracy Kidder

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

Buffy Andrews

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

Laurie Halse Anderson

#4. 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

#5. I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

Don Roff

#6. 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

#7. Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

Edan Lepucki

#8. A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

James A. Owen

#9. Sometimes I would write while inspired and sometimes I would write through sheer force of will, and in revision the writing that I thought was "dead" very frequently turned out to be better because it was more free of ego.

Jesse Michaels

#10. To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

Steve Almond

#11. Writing fiction is: Imagination and structure first and foremost - then revision, revision, revision! Then, revision!

Will Ottinger

#12. 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

#13. I'm an obsessive writer who needs and loves revision. Writing helps me learn and helps me teach.

Kiese Laymon

#14. I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

Libba Bray

#15. I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

Joyce Carol Oates

#16. In my experience, cutting back is the crucial act that allows the vitality, precision and emotional heart of a piece of writing to emerge.

Pamela Erens

#17. In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

W. H. Auden

#18. Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

Raymond Chandler

#19. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Bernard Malamud

#20. Why aren't the thinks I'm thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!?

Christopher Lehman

#21. Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#22. Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.

Pamela Erens

#23. I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Ha Jin

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Patricia Reilly Giff

#27. There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

Susan Bell

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Barrett Wendell

#32. 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

#33. There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

William Faulkner

#37. 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

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

Will Shetterly

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. We write while sleepwalking and revise when awake.

Marty Rubin