David Eddings Quotes

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

There are many challenges I face while working on a book. Working within deadlines and schedules is certainly one of the bigger ones for me. I want to create the best possible book I can for my readers with words and pictures - and that takes time to get it just right.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

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.

For anybody who writes, very often, when you finish an album, you are so done with it. You've been listening in minutia, in super-focus.

I give each book however long it needs to be the best I can make it.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

I will not write a lame follow-up. It could take me 20 years. But I will never turn in a book that I'm not happy with.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.

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

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.

I always want to make sure the book I'm writing is the best book I can deliver.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

For me, whatever you write about should be worthy of your attention, worthy of your gifts. That's very important.

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

You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.

Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.