Top 63 Writing Rewriting Quotes
#1. Interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting - and then, in an instant, it is over,
Hanya Yanagihara
#2. 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
#3. And always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on ...
Basil Bunting
#4. Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
John Updike
#5. Maybe the key to finding the perfect song is simply rewriting the lyrics.
Kandi Steiner
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Writing in journalism teaches you to be very comfortable taking criticism, being edited, and rewriting.
Neil Drumming
#11. Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
Harold Bloom
#12. 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
#13. Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#14. [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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.
Sam Keen
#21. I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#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
#25. 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
#26. I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony.
Sherman Alexie
#28. 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
#29. I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.
Ted Dekker
#30. My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.
Dennis Cooper
#33. Good writing is essentially rewriting.
Roald Dahl
#34. 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
#35. Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.
Cathryn Louis
#36. I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
David McCullough
#38. 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
#39. Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.
Larry L. King
#40. 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
#43. There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.
Susan Bell
#44. 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
#46. Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn.
Jami Attenberg
#47. I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.
Kate DiCamillo
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.
Alan Moore
#51. 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
#52. Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.
Bret Easton Ellis
#54. I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.
Leo Tolstoy
#55. 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
#56. Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
William Zinsser
#57. Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
Paul Engle
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
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