Gulzar Quotes

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.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

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.

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 always want to make sure the book I'm writing is the best book I can deliver.

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

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

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.

When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can.

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

When it's something you really adore, I think you don't want to be the one who accidentally writes a crap episode.

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

Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one.

I write the best book that I can write each time.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That's what I've done.

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.

Catch me on a good day, I think half of my books aren't too bad. Catch me on a bad day, I think I've never written a good line.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

There are many challenges I face while working on a book. Working within deadlines and schedules is certainly one of the bigger ones for me. I want to create the best possible book I can for my readers with words and pictures - and that takes time to get it just right.

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.