Revising Quotes

• Never think of revising as fixing something that is wrong. That starts you off in a negative frame of mind. Rather think of it as an opportunity to improve something you already love.

  Marion Dane Bauer

  Opportunity, Thinking, Mind

  Marion Dane Bauer (1996). “Our Stories: A Fiction Workshop for Young Authors”, p.165, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons ... Good writing means good revising.

  William Strunk, Jr.

  Writing, Learning, Mean

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• I like revising much, much better than getting down a first draft. The first draft is just getting the pieces to the puzzle. Then I get to put the puzzle together!

  Judy Blume

  Together, Pieces, Firsts

  Interview with Kendra Ralston, www.nypl.org. November 19, 2002.

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• Our past is a novel that we are constantly revising.

  Eric G. Wilson

  Past, Novel, Our Past

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• Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

  Lee Gutkind

  Pain, Book, Hard Work

  Source: speechwriting-ghostwriting.typepad.com

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• I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

  Chaim Potok

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

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• When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

  Stephen King

  Hurt, Children, Writing

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• I love revising things, because you see how you can get the language to get closer to intention. You know there are three ways to say X thing, but one will say it better than the other two. And in saying it better, it gets you closer to something.

  Claudia Rankine

  Two, Three, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  People, Boundaries, Categories

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility"”, p.15, Random House

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• The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

  Susan Stewart

  Loss, Thinking, Voice

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• I love revising. If you demystify the process, it comes down to four strategies: what can I do to make the draft better; what should I cut out to make it stronger; what do I need to do to clarify it; and finally, what should I reposition.

  Wally Lamb

  Cutting, Stronger, Needs

  Source: rssfeeds.usatoday.com

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• I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.

  Megan McCafferty

  Book, Writing, Cutting

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• I love the students - they are remarkable, inspiring people. I would miss teaching if I stopped doing it. The kind of work I do is pretty diverse: I can cast a play while doing a polish of a screenplay, while thinking about a new play and revising another. In other words, the kind of work that I do during my work day is not just writing, yet it is all part of the job of being a playwright.

  Donald Margulies

  Jobs, Teaching, Writing

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• One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

  Jacques Barzun

  Reading, Writing, Cutting

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• Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.

  Matt de la Pena

  Writing, Long, Firsts

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking.

  Jeff Bezos

  Thinking, Ideas, Views

  "Some advice from Jeff Bezos" by Jason Fried, signalvnoise.com. October 19, 2012.

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• The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

  J. K. Rowling

  Writing, Mean, Few Words

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• I thought of the idea of Summly in March or April 2011. I was 15 years old and I was revising for some kind of history exam. The problem was I was trying to find information that was useful to me. When you type into Google an esoteric term, you get quite a lot of stuff that's not relevant.

  Nick D'Aloisio

  Years, Ideas, Google

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• The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It's myth making.

  Li-Young Lee

  Memories, Problem, Storytelling

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• For me, intuition comes from experience. After years of experience, a person will have, if they have been paying attention and revising their thinking and behavior, intuitions about their area of experience.

  Charles Faulkner

  Thinking, Years, Intuition

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• Hoping to see karate included in the universal physical education taught in our public schools, I set about revising the kata so as to make them as simple as possible. Times change, the world changes, and obviously the martial arts must change too. The karate that high school students practice today is not the same karate that was practiced even as recently as ten years ago [this book was written in 1956], and it is a long way indeed from the karate I learned when I was a child in Okinawa.

  Gichin Funakoshi

  Art, Children, Book

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• 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

  Writing, Dark, Mind

  Ted Solotaroff (2008). “The Literary Community: Selected Essays : 1967-2007”

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• I write very raw, ugly, illiterate first drafts very quickly (novels are always in first draft in under a year) and then I spend years and years fine-tuning, revising, editing, etc. What inspires me? Who knows. I am not inspired that much. That’s why I write long form fiction - I am not much of a short story writer. Ideas come seldom, but when a good one comes, I really stick to it and see it out. I’m a problem-solver - I've never thrown out an entire manuscript; I've always forced myself to repair it until it was a lovable thing again.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Writing, Editing, Years

  "Beyond Diaspora: Porochista Khakpour". Interview with Roxanne Naseem Rashedi, lareviewofbooks.org. February 17, 2013.

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• When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.

  Gregory Maguire

  Light, Childhood, Soul

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• When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately start revising what I just said. People don't want me to always agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them like me. They feel; "I don't want to exist to like you. I DON'T exist to like you."

  Hugh Prather

  People, Justice, Trying

  Hugh Prather (2009). “Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person”, p.105, Bantam

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