Jean Cocteau Quotes

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

My self-editing process is intense.

Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.

Good writing is good writing, but that doesn't mean you can't orchestrate it or tweak it.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

There are certainly things in live broadcasts that I've done that I wish I could have gone back to edit and make better. It's hard, because you want it to be perfect, and it just isn't. Even in the edited ones, it's not everything you want it to be - but it's closer.

I think it's almost impossible to edit something to death. I think you can make things better almost indefinitely.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.