Gay Talese Quotes

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

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.

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.

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.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.

I revise obsessively. It's important to me to have a clean page.

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

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

My self-editing process is intense.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

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