Jane Smiley Quotes

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist?

Being a perfectionist is really difficult. You're never really happy with what you're doing, no matter how good it is. When you can just release that pressure and be in someone else's work and still have the respect of those creators to bounce off the page and give your ideas that they can take or leave? I really enjoy that.

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

I give each book however long it needs to be the best I can make it.

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

You have to make thousands and thousands of drawings before an illustration is perfected.

I don't go around thinking about regret; regret doesn't consume me as a person... I'm not certain about whether any writer, any artist, any musician, can write without regret, so I don't think perhaps it's even particularly Southern.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

I always say when you write a book, you're a 'one-man band.' Whereas, when you finish a screenplay, it's just a sketch.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.