Revision Quotes

“I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.”

“I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.”

“If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.”

“I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.”

“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.”

“All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!”

“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.”

“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.", May/June 2009)]”

“We were revisionists”

“[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.”