Lydia Davis Quotes

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.

When I'm editing, I tend to cut, go back over it, cut, go back over it, cut, so by the time I'm done, even with a cut, I don't have a rough cut and then work on it so much. I have a pretty rigorous cut of the movie that's usually in the range of what the final movie is going to be. It doesn't mean I don't work on it a lot after that, but I get it into a shape so I feel I can really tell what it needs, or at least it's ready to show people.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.

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

I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

It's funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.

Editing is the most companionable form of education.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

With the possible exception of God during the writing of the Bible, every writer in history has needed an editor. So do you.

I always tell my students to write the story all the way through, not to play with the language and fall in love with sentences that you then have to cut. I actually find that really difficult to do; there's something so demoralizing about looking at a pile of not very great sentences. As I ease into writing every morning, I tweak a sentence and then tweak a paragraph.

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

With writing, we have second chances.

The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.

The draft that finally goes to my editor doesn't get into her hands until I have read it out loud innumerable times - sometimes into a tape recorder - to make sure that it sounds right.

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.