Writing Perfection Quotes

I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of perfect.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

It's my belief that you should never show your work to anyone in the publishing world until it shines like a diamond. Rough drafts don't shine, as a rule. Mine certainly didn't. That's why I was rejected for years and years.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.

Remember that your job as a practicing writer is to remember it's never going to be perfect on your first pass.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.

I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

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.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.

I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.

I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.

When you write something it has to hit the level that you accept as being good.

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.