Matt Ridley Quotes

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.

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

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

I fix things all the time. Every time I do a solo, I re-check it and correct things that don't hit the mark.

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

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

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

My self-editing process is intense.

I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.

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.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

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'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.

When people start writing there is this idea that you have to get everything right first time, every sentence has to be perfect, every paragraph has to be perfect, every chapter has to be perfect, but what you're doing is not any kind of public show, until you're ready for it.

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.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

The thing I love about making movies is the peace of mind that I know I don't have to be perfect the first time. I can be perfect the second time or the third time.

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

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.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

I don't really analyze my process. I do know that if it's not right, I won't move on. I'm tenacious to a fault about that.

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.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

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