Gore Vidal Quotes

I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing to a chapter, I'll change and change round again until I'm satisfied.

When you edit, you imagine your enemy is seated on the other side of the table. Your enemy! And your enemy is going to read that with a viciousness, because he knows where you didn't work on it. He's going to shake it and really aim for that jugular. So you are going to polish, and revise, and rewrite, and cut out, and shape it, so that your enemy has no place to grip it. That's how you revise.

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem.

Edits are very important to me - they're the way in which I work on everything.

Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I've rewritten it.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Each one of the films get built up and strengthened and reinforced, and we're not afraid to rip stuff out and redo it until we feel it's worthy of the 'Pixar' name.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

Where I thrive is with my hands on the keyboard or my pen on the paper. One of the things I get to do is I get to rewrite. I rewrite, and I work hard on my scripts. You can rewrite until you're 'perfect,' and that's something that's safe for me.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

I'm a big advocate of revisions, of living with something for a month and then realizing what needs changing, what was lazy, what could be better.

I've written under the radar for quite some time, and I always looked at editing as writing.

I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

Seeing the first edit is the worst.

There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week.

I'm a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I'll keep fooling with it forever.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.