Neil Simon Quotes

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

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.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

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.

There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.

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 rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.

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

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing to a chapter, I'll change and change round again until I'm satisfied.

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

You have to write a lot. And you have to rewrite what you wrote a lot more.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing-grindin g, buffing, and polishing-not writing.

It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.

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.

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes