Alexander Pope Quotes

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

Asking myself, 'Is this any good?' is pointless. It just slows down my writing, and I can't tell anyway. It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

My self-editing process is intense.

Applause is interesting, but I'm a monster with or without it. Something is either well written or it isn't. 'White Rabbit' is not well written, and no amount of applause or royalties can convince me it is. I could have done a better job with those lyrics. They didn't say what I wanted.

I'm so critical of my own work that it's difficult for me to disassociate myself and watch it as an audience.

I'm more critical of the films I make than anyone else.

I have to write the songs before I become too enamored with my own melodies.

I think self-criticism is sort of a given when you're an actor. It's also about being curious and not being flippant. Anyone who accepts being in this noble profession is automatically self-critical.

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I'll spend more time on a song then. I'm more critical about it, because there's no one else in the room to tell me, 'That's really not translating. I'm not getting what you're saying.' So, I'm constantly rewriting it, thinking, 'No, that's fine,' and going back.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.

One of my rules about writing exercises is you never are allowed to put them in your book because it's just too tempting. You try to shoehorn things that don't belong.

I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

No book I publish will be perfect, but I need to feel I've taken it as far as I can.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

Writing for late night is really good for learning how to write when you don't want to write. You have to produce every day. It's also very good for refining the difference between your point of view and the host's.