Quotes about Revision

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

The two most important tools an architect has are the eraser in the drawing room and the sledge hammer on the construction site.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

The stuff that comes easy takes the most rewriting. And the stuff that comes hard reads the easiest (Writing for the Soul, p. 194).

An old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Some have been tempted to revise Jesus' command to read, Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality.

Continually revise your relationship to God until the only certainty you have is not that you are faithful, but that He is.

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.

A new untruth is better than an old truth.