Revisiting Ideas Quotes

Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.

There is nothing worth thinking but it has been thought before; we must only try to think it again.

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.

Rereading, we find a new book.

When you give up a bit of work don't (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

If you're involved in with something that's original, you know, you'll always go back and try to rehash it.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.

It was a matter of going back through a lot of sermons and remembering the questions and conversations, where these ideas came from. So the book [Max on Life] is really kind of a second chance to answer these questions.

The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more powerful attractions, to spread such flowers over the regions through which the intellect has already made its progress, as may tempt it to return, and take a second view of things hastily passed over, or negligently regarded.

I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place. It's like reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' every five years. You realise that some things have caught up.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.