Creative Revision Quotes

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.

Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.

There were a couple of things I lost sleep over with the play 'Frost/Nixon,' so I went back and addressed them a bit more in the film.

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.

All my pictures are a kind of revision of my original idea. This is surely very different from the way in which Japanese or Chinese artists work: their themes are pre-ordained, whereas mine are invented at will.

I've redone plays of mine and made changes. A play is a living thing, and I'd never say I wouldn't rewrite years later. Tennessee Williams did that all the time, and it's distressing, because I'd like the play to be out there in its finished form.

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.

Yes, I did some rewrites of the show as some of the stuff was not very good and I worked my butt off to make it something that the audience liked and that I could be proud of.

By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.

As I'm writing, I start to see connections, and themes I didn't see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It's a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational.

When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

My stories take three or four months to fix, and it's not magical of a process. Ultimately it's a boring, difficult process. I write everything out, and then the parts I think are funny I put in bold. Then I go perform it. Then the parts that aren't funny, I unbold them.

If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

One of the things I like to do during an 'overhaul' revision is bust out my highlighters and colored pens. Tools like these make me feel like a real writer.

Most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done.

I'm dissatisfied with every record the Beatles ever f***ing made. There ain't one of them I wouldn't remake.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.