Gene Fowler Quotes

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

Movies are not finished. They are abandoned. A movie is never finished.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.

When you are a writer, the assist-to-turnover ratio... there are a lot more turnovers than assists.

The hardest part for me is to finish a track. I start new projects all the time.

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished - a word that for them has no sense - but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.