Janet Flanner Quotes

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

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

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.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

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.

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

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.

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

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.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

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

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

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.

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

Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I've rewritten it.

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.