Rewriting Quotes

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I’m not against thinking; I’m only against thinking that thinking on its own will get you out of a hole. Shovel also needed.”
― Scott Westerfeld

“Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson

“Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“I want you to judge me without thinking about it.
I want you to give me advice without considering my opinion.
I want you to expecting anything without the need to trust me.
I want you to decide for me with all the care in the world.
I want you to help me without smothering me.
I want you to decide without seeing my point of view.
I want you to hug me without holding me...
I want you to feel protected in my presence without me having to lie.
I want you to be close without suffocating me.
I want you to know everything without knowing anything...
I want you to know that both love and friendship should always be Unconditional.”
― Stefan Dimov

“When asked about rewriting, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that spontaneous eloquence seemed like a miracle and that he rewrote every word he ever published, and often several times. And Mark Strand, former poet laureate, says that each of his poems sometimes goes through forty to fifty drafts before it is finished.”
― Susan M. Tiberghien, One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer's Art and Craft

“Rebels revel in rewriting reality's restrictions.”
― Ryan Lilly

“I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that's like gardening in the basement. I don't publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“It takes one person to rewrite the history book.”
― J.R. Rim

“Write at a pace that doesn't surpass your creative flow. Don't be hasty; don't be sloppy. Don't forfeit impressive writing for an impressive word count. Because eventually it will all have to be edited, and you'll find that it is harder to make bad writing good than to make good writing better.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich

“Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.”
― Ted Solotaroff

“You become a great writer by writing lots and lots of stories, not by rewriting the same story over and over again.”
― Scott William Carter

“There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself

“Rewriting is the crucible where books are born.”
― Cathryn Louis

“The real art of writing is, of course, in rewriting.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.”
― Stewart Stafford

“When I asked Sam Shillace, who ran Gmail and Google Apps for four years, about the costliest mistake he's seen engineers make, his response was, "Trying to rewrite stuff from scratch -- that's the cardinal sin.”
― Edmond Lau, The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact

“No matter how many times you stir up a steaming pile of crap, it’s still just a steaming pile of crap.”
― Algis Budrys

“Their first task therefore, was to translate the original C# codebase into Java so that it could leverage Google's infrastructure. One of Schillace's co-founders argued that they ought to rewrite the parts of the codebase they didn't like at the same time. After all, why rewrite the codebase to Java only to have to immediately throw parts away? Schillace fought hard against that logic, saying, "We're not doing that because we'll get lost. Step one is translate to Java and get it stood back up on it's feet again ... [O]nce it's working again in Java, step two is ... go refactor and rewrite stuff that's bugging you.”
― Edmond Lau, The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact

“Writing is rewriting and though there are many passages in my books that are essentially a first take, everything else can take many, many attempts before it finds the ideal shape. And what makes it ideal? I know it when I read it.”
― Paul Lynch