Rewriting Quotes

My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it. ~ Mary Rodgers

Nobody told all the new e-mail writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they are writing with ease and enjoyment doesn't mean they are writing well. ~ William Zinsser

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive. ~ Susan Sontag

The real war will never get in the books. ~ Walt Whitman

I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves. ~ Sam Keen

GREAT THINGS sometimes come from rewriting under pressure. ~ Lynn Hunt

Live your own life and chose your own path - rewriting destiny. ~ Shelly Morgan

Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn. ~ Jami Attenberg

Here is a rewriting of the British national anthem, by 'Camille, Australia'. It is, she explains, chiefly for the benefit of Microsoft Word and Outlook Express users:

Gd CTRL-S r gr8sh Qun.
Long liv r nobl Qun.
Gd CTRL-S the. Qun!
ALT-S hr vktrES,
HpE & glrES,
Lng 2 rain ovR S
Gd CTRL-S th. Qun! ~ David Crystal

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. ~ George Orwell

With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell. ~ Michael Connelly

Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for the book
reportedly the most anyone has ever received for rewriting history. ~ Ann Coulter

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives. ~ Azar Nafisi

Good writing is writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. Sometimes, it happens to work right away, and that's amazing. But most of the time, it happens to work, and then you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, and maybe it even comes back to the thing it was in the first place, but then you know for sure that it is good, and it's what you wanted to do. ~ Kate Beaton

A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history--that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to--through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life--locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. ~ Suzan-Lori Parks

The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters. ~ Saul Bellow

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics. ~ Terry Pratchett

The past is a script we are constantly rewriting. ~ Michael Moorcock

Learn a lot about the world and finish things, even if it is just a short story. Finish it before you start something else. Finish it before you start rewriting it. That's really important.
It's to find out if you're going to be a writer or not, because that's one of the most important lessons.
Most, maybe 90% of people, will start writing and never finish what they started. If you want to be a writer that's the hardest and most important lesson: Finish it. Then go back to fix it. ~ Tad Williams

Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I'll spend more time on a song then. I'm more critical about it, because there's no one else in the room to tell me, 'That's really not translating. I'm not getting what you're saying.' So, I'm constantly rewriting it, thinking, 'No, that's fine,' and going back. ~ Hunter Hayes

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~ James A. Michener

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry. ~ Caroline Leavitt

I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

I'm the one who still needs rewriting. Don't we all? ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I never got caught up in playing for history, seeing how many majors I could win, or rewriting the record books. Those are selfish objectives, and the guy who chokes usually does so because he dwells on what it all means to him. I was only worried about my family. And although I had my share of failures, it was never because I choked. ~ Billy Casper

I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go. ~ Terry Pratchett

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun! ~ Kristen McKee

Simply put: writing is rewriting. ~ Ronald Dane

Endurance races are a microcosm of life; you're high, you're low, in the race, out of the race, crushing it, getting crushed, managing fears, rewriting stories. ~ Travis Macy

He always says that those who control the present can rewrite the past. ~ Anne Fortier

If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. ~ Chuck Klosterman

When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot. ~ Ruggero Leoncavallo

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay. ~ Kate DiCamillo

No matter how great a writer, artist, or entrepreneur, he is a mortal, he is fallible. He is not proof against Resistance. He will drop the ball; he will crash. That's why they call it rewriting. ~ Steven Pressfield

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten. ~ Paul Engle

It's customary for the field team to take a break after a confirmed memetic incursion into baseline reality - in layman's terms, we're supposed to get some time off after we stop a fairy tale from rewriting a major metropolitan area into an evil, R-rated version of Disney World. New and improved! Now with extra incest and murder! ~ Seanan McGuire

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real. ~ Eric Jerome Dickey

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 rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair. ~ Robert Stone

Once you start rewriting, you're not able to stop. With each draft the fundamental banality and worthlessness of the material becomes more evident even as its vitality and spontaneity are drained from it. ~ Barry N. Malzberg

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor. ~ Kurt Loder

Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost. ~ William Zinsser

On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable. ~ Alan Moore

You don't propose marriage after one date. You don't decide on a career after one article or class session. You don't cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading. ~ Dave Eggers

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account. ~ Dan Brown

All writing is rewriting. ~ John Green

Memories are peculiar...You think the past is there, all fixed and stable, but it is really chock full of surprises and endlessly susceptible to change...So maybe it is true that we are constantly rewriting our past; they are not something fixed and unchangeable for all time. There is a basic structure, of course, a canvas stretched across boards, which cannot be remodeled at will, but the surface of that canvas can be shaded, rearranged, touched up, continually worked on to correspond to the needs of the present. In fact, the present moment is largely the focal point from which you shape the direction of your future and juggle the implications of your past. ~ Elizabeth Arthur

The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can't polish what you haven't written.

Things that made for a normal life - like a daily routine that followed the sun - took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn't a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep.

He would often awake with a new idea - as if he'd merely been on a break and not unconscious - and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot's seat in a ship that could go anywhere. ~ Vincent H. O'Neil

Good writing is essentially rewriting. ~ Roald Dahl

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It has been said, "History is written by the victors." I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history. ~ Jennifer Beals

The book really comes to life in the rewriting. ~ Philip Roth

During improvisations, I'll hear people bringing back up details from something I heard about at breakfast or something somebody was saying that they were thinking about, and it informs a rewriting of a scene. ~ Joe Swanberg

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. ~ Margaret Thatcher

I keep rewriting this poem. I want it to make more sense. I want it to be less honest. ~ Trista Mateer

What Tengo would have to do, it seemed, was take a hard, honest look at the past while standing at the crossroads of the present. Then he could create a future, as thought he were rewriting the past.It was the only way ~ Haruki Murakami

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting. ~ Tony Gilroy

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.
Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that 'our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.' This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade. They aim not to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all. ~ Rose Tremain

All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint. ~ David Eagleman

I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. ~ August Wilson

I know when a story is finished when there is not a single thing more I can think to do to it. And since I know at the start what the last line will be, I know when I've reached that point as logically as I can that it's finished. As for the rewriting-it's not foolproof, of course, but if you're honest about having thought of every possibility and you still come back to what you have, what more can you do? ~ Amy Hempel

Christ, dealing with you is like rewriting The fucking Art of War,' he grumbled... ~ C.C. Gibbs

For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting. ~ Kevin Crossley-Holland

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods. ~ David Mitchell

I didn't want to be like the novelist who spent so much time rewriting his first sentence that he never wrote his second. ~ Gretchen Rubin

The only kind of writing is rewriting. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Gabbe stepped forward. "Cam's right. I've heard the Scale speak of these shifts." She was tugging on the sleeves of her pale yellow cashmere cardigan as if she would never get warm. "They're called timequakes. They are ripples in our reality."
"And the closer he gets," Roland added, with his usual understated wisdom, "the closer we are to the terminus of his Fall, the more frequent and the more severe the timequakes will become. Time is faltering in preparation for rewriting itself."
"Like the way your computer freezes up more and more frequently before the hard drive crashes and erases your twenty-page term paper?" Miles said. Everyone looked at him in befuddlement. "What?" he asked. "Angels and demons don't do homework? ~ Lauren Kate

We're constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it. ~ S.J. Watson

You are never too old, too small, or too late to live the life you're meant to lead. Especially if it means rewriting the rules to do it. ~ Ann Shen

Maybe the key to finding the perfect song is simply rewriting the lyrics. ~ Kandi Steiner

Writing for me is largely about rewriting. ~ Khaled Hosseini

By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it. ~ Terry Pratchett

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

That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about. ~ Michael Scott

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work. ~ Elizabeth Strout

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

Rewriting the world one heart at a time. ~ Coco J. Ginger

History is a set of lies agreed upon. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that. ~ Lynne Tillman

I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony. ~ Sherman Alexie

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina. ~ John Irving

Sophie Kruger had worked in a house herself, up in Middle Swan. But now she pretended she was quality. There were none so self-righteous as those who rewrote their past. ~ Sandra Dallas

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. ~ Tom Stoppard

[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

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

Tim Conway was a little different from the rest. He was always in the back of the studio building something with the prop man, rewriting his lines, or plotting our demise. ~ Vicki Lawrence

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self. ~ Harold Bloom

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Another trick in software is to avoid rewriting the software by using a piece that's already been written, so called component approach which the latest term for this in the most advanced form is what's called Object Oriented Programming. ~ Bill Gates

I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow. ~ Neil Gaiman

This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. ~ Susanna Kaysen

You let the story cool off and then, instead of rewriting it, you relive it. ~ Ray Bradbury

Quoting someone and rewriting their words makes it a quote from you and not them any longer. To change the meaning of someone's words without permission is offensive enough, to then contact the quoted person and try to justify it to them is even worse. It's verbatim or bust! ~ Stewart Stafford

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing. ~ Jim Gaffigan

Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Of course you cannot keep a wife-
Everyone's got to live their life! ~ Kristen McKee

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point. ~ Joan Didion

The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting ... Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur. ~ Sol Stein

God began rewriting the ending to my life's story, our worlds collided with His, and He provided us with the most beautiful second chance. ~ Shelley Taylor

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics. ~ Laura Marling