Chuck Klosterman Quotes

I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns. It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything.

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.

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

I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way, and you know you're not quite there, and you're redoing it and redoing it, and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me.

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.

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

I write really slowly, and my lines are really, really terrible all the time. It takes so long for me to get them to be where I won't be embarrassed to sing them, and then feel like they're great.

I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over.

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.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

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.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

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

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

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.

To be honest, I rewrote 'Wicked Nights' a number of times. I just wasn't happy with the end result.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.