George Murray Quotes

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'

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

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

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

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

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

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.

I fix things all the time. Every time I do a solo, I re-check it and correct things that don't hit the mark.

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

I spent the entire morning inserting a comma; I spent the whole afternoon removing it again.

Writing is the easy part. The 'getting it right' part is harder.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

I never trust anything that can be captured in 2 takes.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

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.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

The first draft often is really fast, and I'd be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it.