James Taylor Quotes

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

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.

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.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

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

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

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.

Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

I'm always writing; I'm always jotting things down on paper or making notes in my iPhone. Then I'll make myself sit down and kind of shape it up, but there's really no other way to practice other than onstage.

I try not to agonize over my lyrics, though, because that can come across in them. Some lyrics come more easily than others and some you have to spend a lot of time on, but I think you have to watch that you don't take the life out of them by worrying too much.

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

Most of my early work was done on typewriter. And the only way to iterate drafts was to re-type it.