Frank Auerbach Quotes

Edits are very important to me - they're the way in which I work on everything.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

What I've learned from sketch is you can get it as perfect as you want, and it's never going to be perfect.

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

There are a lot of different elements in play when you're remaking something people care about.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

I've noticed it a lot. I'm not someone who revises. It's always the first movement, it's that. It's an instinct. Either it works straight away, or it won't ever work.

I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.

I think too many people edit themselves way too soon. There's plenty of time to edit, and it is a crucial part of it all, too.

History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

I'm a big advocate of revisions, of living with something for a month and then realizing what needs changing, what was lazy, what could be better.

You must be very creative in our business. Creating in this business is making something new, but it is also touching on something old.

My process is pretty messy, and there's a lot of creative destruction in it. When I set out to write something, I'll write some passages from it just to figure out who these characters are, how they talk. And I have a dim sense of what it's about and where it's going to go, but I know that's going to change, too.

When I'm making a collage, there are a lot of things about it that are violent.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed.

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

Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

That's what artists do, that's what poets do - we all do it. We start with something, and sometimes we destroy everything that we've made in order to get to the core place where we started from.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.