Revision Quotes

decade after the first edition of this book was published, Yan Wong and I met in the fitting surroundings of the Oxford Museum of Natural History to discuss the possibility of producing a new, tenth anniversary edition. Yan, once my undergraduate pupil, had been employed as my research assistant during the writing of the original edition, before he left for his lecturing position in Leeds and his career as a television presenter. He played an enormously important part in the conception and execution of the first edition, and he was credited as joint author of several of the chapters. During the course of our discussion ten years on, we realised that much new information had come in, especially from the molecular genetics laboratories of the world. Yan undertook the bulk of the revision and I proposed to the publisher that this time he should be properly credited as joint author of the whole book. ~ Richard Dawkins

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor. ~ Suzanne Collins

Volunteer sentences are the relics of your education And the desire to emulate the grown-up, workaday prose that surrounds you, Which is made overwhelmingly of sentences that are banal and structurally thoughtless. A volunteer sentence is almost always a perfunctory sentence. That can change. But only after years of questioning the shapes of sentences you read, And every sentence you write. Don't let the word "years" alarm you. Think of it as months and months and months and months. You may think a volunteer sentence is an inspired one Simply because it volunteers. This is one reason to abandon the idea of inspiration. All the idea of inspiration will do Is stop you from revising a volunteer sentence. Only revision will tell you whether a sentence that offers itself is worth keeping. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

I reserve the right to evolve. What I think and feel today is subject to revision tomorrow. ~ Laurence Overmire

I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs. ~ Mary J. Miller

The Exile In July 587 BCE, Babylonian soldiers broke through Jerusalem's walls, ending a starvation siege that had lasted well over a year. They burned the city and Solomon's temple and took its king and many other leaders to Babylon as captives, leaving others to fend for themselves in the destroyed land. Many surrounding countries disappeared altogether when similar disasters befell them. But Judah did not. Instead, the period scholars most often call the "Babylonian exile" inspired religious leaders to revise parts of Scripture that had been passed down to them. It also sparked the writing of entirely new Scriptures and the revision of ideas about God, creation, and history. Much of what is called the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament was written, edited, and compiled during and after this national tragedy. ~ Walter Brueggemann

Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

How many times are we offered the opportunity to rewrite the past and therefore the future, to reconfigure our present personas - a widow rather than a divorcee, faithful rather faithless? The past is subject to all kinds of revision, it is hardly a stable field, and every alteration in the past dictates an alteration in the future. Even a change in our conception of the past can result in a different future, different to the one we planned. ~ Katie Kitamura

Instead of showing visibly distinct alternate identities, the typical DID patient presents a polysymptomatic mixture of dissociative and posttraumatic stressdisorder (PTSD) symptoms that are embedded in a matrix of ostensibly non-trauma-related symptoms (e.g., depression, panic attacks, substance abuse,somatoform symptoms, eating-disordered symptoms). The prominence of these latter, highly familiar symptoms often leads clinicians to diagnose only these comorbid conditions. When this happens, the undiagnosed DID patient may undergo a long and frequently unsuccessful treatment for these other conditions.
- Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p5 ~ James A. Chu

In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat. ~ Laura Mullen

Occasionally, I like to select a mentor, a master, and let him guide me through a revision of one of my paintings ... I try to move into his terrain, bringing my own ammunition ... I do not believe ... that this belittles my own personality. ~ Rico Lebrun

One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought. ~ Jacques Barzun

The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in. ~ Henry Green

Students need to be reminded that revision isn't merely making a few cosmetic changes. Revision is seeing and then reseeing our words and practicing strategies that make a difference in our writing. ~ Georgia Heard

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Credit ratings and risk weightings must undergo a thorough process of review and revision. No security or instrument on the planet should have a zero risk weighting. ~ Paul Singer

Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship. ~ Voltairine De Cleyre

Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole. ~ J.K. Rowling

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat. ~ Michael Longley

Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The 'housewives' of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart 'homemakers' of the 1980s, then the 'soccer moms' of the 1990s, then the stay-at-home moms of the 2000s. Next may come the homeschooling homesteaders of the impending post-apocalypse - who knows? What's significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture. ~ Carina Chocano

Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change. ~ Richard Branson

The DID patient should be seen as a whole adult person with the identities sharing responsibility for daily life. Despite patients' subjective experience of separateness, clinicians must keep in mind that the patient is a single person and generally must hold the whole person (i.e., system of alternate identities) responsible for the behavior of any or all of the constituent identities, even in the presence of amnesia or the sense of lack of control or agency over behavior.
From p8
International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. (2011). Guidelines for treating dissociative identity disorder in adults, third revision: Summary version. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 12, 188–212. ~ James A. Chu

However, if one has been playing the buy-and-hold game with quality securities, one has been exposed to a substantial amount of market risk because the valuations placed on these securities have implied overly rosy scenarios prone to popular revision in times of more realistic expectation. This is one of those times, but it is my feeling that the revisions have not been severe enough, the expectations not yet realistic enough. Hence, the world's best companies largely remain overpriced in the marketplace. ~ Michael Burry

What is a memory, anyway? Is it an indelible record, unimpeachable, frozen in some synaptic arrangement and stored away for some moment it might be needed in the future? Or is it subject to editing and revision, something plastic that our brains can shape into another form we can handle, something less toxic than the original, something less able to poison us? ~ Jon Harrison

This revision of the Constitution will not be perfect. But at least the Constitution will not be inflexible. It will be a step towards the Social Europe which we wish. ~ Laurent Fabius

So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it. ~ Edward Hirsch

Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think. ~ Isaac Asimov

Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial. ~ Pamela Erens

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea. ~ T. S. Eliot

The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book. ~ Dan Brown

Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem. ~ Marvin Bell

Dr Jack Cohen Podiatrist is an orthopedic specialist with extensive experience in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases and injuries of human skeleton system. The narrow field of action for Jack Cohen DPM is surgery of knee, arthroscopic surgery and sports medicine, reconstructive surgery of the lower extremities, installation of artificial hip and knee joints. Immediate area of Dr Jack Cohen DPM activity is arthroscopic reconstruction of the ligaments of the knee joint, surgery cartilage damage of large joints, revision of embedded artificial joints. As a subspecialist children's orthopedics, Dr Jack Cohen Podiatrist deals with the diagnosis and treatment of specific diseases and injuries of the locomotors system in children and adolescents. ~ Jack Cohen

I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book. ~ Libba Bray

The backbone of any improvement of governance, its development as well as its protection from any form of wastage or excessiveness, is a mechanism to place laws under the microscope of revision and modernization until they resonate in tune with the methodological development and new administrative technologies. ~ Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. ~ Peter Porter

Angus had not been particularly helpful in his suggestions. He had himself composed the words of a hymn some time ago when he had offered to the hymn revision committee of the Church of Scotland a composition called "God Looks Down on Belgium." The opening words of this hymn, however, proved to be not quite what the committee wanted: "God's never heard of Belgium / But loves it just the same / For God is kind and doesn't mind / He's not impressed with fame. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

What force is yanking at our sleeves? This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don't even notice. But it's a miracle. ~ Steven Pressfield

We would labor earnestly to raise a believer in salvation by free will into a believer in salvation by grace, for we long to see all religious teaching built upon the solid rock of truth and not upon the sand of imagination. At the same time, our grand object is not the revision of opinions, but the regeneration of natures. We should bring men to Christ, not to our own particular views of Christianity. ~ Charles Spurgeon

God Himself has reserved no right of revision of His own laws nor is there any need for Him for any such revision. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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. ~ Lisa Graff

The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement. ~ H.L. Mencken

I gave him the name Wiki, because his brain seems to contain as much knowledge as Wikipedia, whereas my revision notes disappear from my memory as fast as a Snapchat. ~ Zoe Sugg

He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution. ~ William Howard Taft

Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or ~ Robert Lane Greene

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision. ~ Virginia Woolf

Just because they can't feel it doesn't mean that I have to forget, Everyday we get closer to a greater truth, a gift to accept, Now you may call me a liar or even call me a fake, But then life is a lesson you have to take, Everyday is a revision of how to count the price of frozen tears, Verdicts would change when we meet the truth between years. ~ Harpreet Singh Nanda

Keeping this journal causes tension as much as it calms it. The writing busies my hands and occupies my mind, but there's something about the pen scratching against the thick textured paper that makes my words take on an uncomfortable weight. Online, words flow almost as quickly as thoughts without revision or purpose, the way they do when you're alone or with someone who's fallen in love with you. ~ Wayne Gladstone

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done. ~ Benjamin Cardozo

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go. ~ George Saunders

And, again, this story needs to be revised, is under revision as I type these words. The only way to write an autobiography, I suppose, is to keep writing indefinitely. As soon as your fingers stop moving, this act - your fingers stalling on the keyboard - changes the story. There. I can't keep up. And this idea that it should all be working toward something, that the autobiographical subject in the present tense should be working through the biggest puzzle of her life and arriving somehow at... something. Something big. At what? Happiness? Understanding? Forgiveness? A baby? A book?

I have not arrived. ~ Jill Christman

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work. ~ Tracy Kidder

The job description of mother is clearly in need of revision. As it stands, the shifts are 24 hours, for a period of approximately 1,825 consecutive days. The benefits are sorely in need of amendment: no vacations, no sick leave, no lunch hours, no breaks. Moreover, it is the only unpaid position I know of that can result in arrest if you fail to show up for work. ~ Mary Blakely

The whole conception of man already endowed with a mind capable of conceiving civilization setting out to create it is fundamentally false. Man did not simply impose upon the world a pattern created by his mind. His mind is itself a system that constantly changes as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself to his surroundings. It would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into effect the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as our medieval forefathers or even our grandparents were able to foresee our manner of life today. ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

The general will be joining us, shortly.
[..] A Revision officer dropping the brother in front of a rank was the most threatening thing Sergei had heard in a long time. He stared at Nikishin, tried to read his features, but that was entirely impossible. Never before had Nikishin appeared more the arm of the law. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

Revision plays a very large role in writing. Sometimes it seems to be all revision. And the longer I write, the more I revise-until it is completely right. ~ Ellen Hunnicutt

The imagination works not so much through inspiration as through perseverance. One must slog through the false starts, spot the wrong words and hold out for the right ones, and above all, be vigilant about staying on the path of revision, no matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become. ~ Kathleen Norris

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good."
In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves - this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it. ~ Susan Bell

But when it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn't mean you've wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don't amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most ~ Alice Hoffman

It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views. ~ Peter York

[...] Within the religious realm, the same can be said about that type of'apologetics' that claims to agree with the results of modern science-an utterly illusory undertaking and one that constantly requires revision; one that also runs the risk of linking religion with changing and ephemeral conceptions, from which it must remain completely independent. ~ Rene Guenon

There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure.
Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure.
The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin's-egg-blue to future generations.
Perhaps it's so not important that the dead man lives.
After all, the dead man deserts the future. ~ Marvin Bell

We are entrusted, you must know, with the revision of the English Dictionary. On the evidence of the Liverpool find of Christmas cards, in which occurred such couplets as:

Just to hope the day keeps fine
For you and your this Christmas time,

and:

I hope this stocking's in your line
When stars shine bright at Christmas-time

I hold that "Christmas-time" was often pronounced "Christmas-tine", and that this is a dialect variant of the older "Christmas-tide". Quant denies this, with a warmth that is unusual in him.'
'Quant is right. ~ Robert Graves

In a way, the fearful fundamentalists are right: globalism does undermine systems of absolute value and belief. But in a way they are wrong: the systems of value and belief do not immediately disappear - people simply inhabit them in a different fashion, and sometimes the old ways turn out to have a surprising amount of life left in them. The human mind has a great repertoire of ways to accept and honor social constructions of reality without swallowing them whole. Globalizing processes require us to renegotiate our relationships with familiar cultural forms, and remind us that they are things made by people: human, fallible things, subject to revision. Globalism ~ Walter Truet Anderson

The co-presence of mind and object simply is not sufficient for an apprehension or comprehension of any object. Before one can seize an object, one must be equipped with a whole mass of sensitivities, concepts, expectations, background assumptions. A layman looking at a car engine just sees a jumble of metal objects and wires; a person who knows about car engines can immediately identify the parts and see their interconnection. Countless similar examples can be invoked: the capacity to perceive depends on the possession of the appropriate concepts. ... And here's the rub: the concepts, the anticipatory classifications and interpretations, contain theories which a) had to be discovered and built up by a long process, and b) may yet in the future turn out to be false. So even the purest of hearts, free of inner deception, will not perceive and understand an object unless endowed with proper intellectual equipment. Perception is never, so to speak, the innocent encounter of a pure mind with a naked object, and therefore capable of serving as an untainted foundation for an edifice of knowledge; perception is the encounter with some given element, which cannot be seized or isolated in its purity, but depends on a corpus of knowledge acquired up to that time, but open to revision in the future. ~ Ernest Gellner

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work. ~ Cate Marvin

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived. ~ Noam Chomsky

We write while sleepwalking and revise when awake. ~ Marty Rubin

History isn't all fact
it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past. ~ Heather Anastasiu

The upward revision of import duty, from 1 per cent to over 4 per cent on steam coal imports, will adversely impact the industry, as it will lead to increase in cost of power generation. ~ Gautam Adani

The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology. ~ Stanislav Grof

Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more "real" or more important than any other.

Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision ~ James A. Chu

For octopi, ink is a defense mechanism, a means of escape. It is for me as well. Octopi surround themselves with clouds of ink in order to disappear before the clouds dissipate. Sometimes they also create hovering blots of ink that mimic their own shape, so predators will attack the ink and not them. Every time I write about my family, I instinctively obscure the truth with a cloud of self-protection, and invent versions of my life that give me a chance to evade the attacks I dread. The only way I know to get past the sense of threat is to go ahead and release the ink and then slowly wait for the cloud to clear. That might be revision. It might mean time. It might mean a lifetime of time. ~ Briallen Hopper

The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society. ~ Thurgood Marshall

For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places. ~ Dana Spiotta

Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes
the thought and preparation, vision and revision
whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history. ~ Patricia J. Williams

Embrace the melancholic voice completely in the drafting stages, to explore it for all it's worth. Then, in revision, privilege craft over pure feeling. Write the work that someone besides you will want to read. ~ David Starkey

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process. ~ Edan Lepucki

But to me, each revision of the document simply showed how far the initial Flevel implementation had progressed. Those parts of the language that were not yet implemented were still described in free-flowing flowery prose giving promise of unalloyed delight. In the parts that had been implemented, the flowers had withered; they were choked by an undergrowth of explanatory footnotes, placing arbitrary and unpleasant restrictions on the use of each feature and loading upon a programmer the responsibility for controlling the complex and unexpected side-effects and interaction effects with all the other features of the language. ~ C.A.R. Hoare

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work. ~ Steve Almond

Art has no answers, only solutions, and resolutions... Art has only vision and revision... Art has only hope and more hope... again and again, against circumstance and history... What we hope life might be, again and again, against what we see it has been. In hope, there is a reason to continue. ~ Israel Horovitz

Therefore, as you seek to know God, there isn't a need to dabble in lots of different religions or make up one that makes Him more "modern and current." Basically, God's Word needs no revision. And the commandments aren't like the constitution: amending them to fit with the times isn't necessary. ~ Chantel Hobbs

By the late 20th century, the general consensus among most historians attributed the origins of fascism to one of the numerous branches of heretical Marxism that had developed into dictatorship, nationalization, welfarism, and militarism. Later, Sternhell, in The Birth of Fascist Ideology, he took the position that the 'origins' of Franco-Italian fascism ideology was 'Marxism,' or to be more precise, from 'a very specific revision of Marxism. ~ L.K. Samuels

But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity. ~ K.M. Soehnlein

Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision. ~ Barrett Wendell

The process of revision should be constant and endless ~ Salman Rushdie

Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and truly creative writer. It will replace attitude with genuine confidence, and empty arrogance with artistry. ~ Molly Cochran

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests - medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house - our relationship in it, with it, with each other - is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame. ~ J.P. Delaney

[Memory] ... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense ... Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world. ~ John Daniel

I am particularly horrified by the use of propaganda and the manipulation of the truth and the revision of history. ~ Hillary Clinton

It all depends on what I'm working on and if there is a deadline involved. Anything that's headed toward a magazine or newspaper is hacked out on the computer; that's a matter of efficiency. I write longer pieces of prose on a typewriter because the act of retyping it for the computer is a useful tactic for revision. Poems tend to be written longhand. ~ Kevin Keck

Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

A dear and long-time friend, ... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual ... ~ Jacob Neusner

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are. ~ Jonathan Kozol

The longer I write, the more important I believe it is to write the first draft as fast as possible. In drafting, I push myself so I am at the edge of discomfort ... Later, it will be time for consideration and reconsideration, slow, careful revision and editing. But on the first draft I have to achieve velocity, just as you do if you want the bike to balance. ~ Donald Murray

[Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions. ~ Rachel Carson

Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision ~ Harry Crews

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide. ~ Hilma Wolitzer

The dialectical change of mind that occurs in Buddhism is not simply the assimilation of a new philosophical basis or religious basis for viewing and interpreting experience. Rather it is the complete structural revision of that which is. ~ Frederick Lenz

There is an urgent need for a radical revision of our current concepts of the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter and the brain. ~ Stanislav Grof