Kevin Crossley-Holland Quotes

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

I can always make things longer than I intend for them to be, but cutting things down is just brutal. It's like cutting off your fingers every time you lose a word.

Omit needless words.

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.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

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

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

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

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

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

Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

I revise obsessively. It's important to me to have a clean page.

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