Paul Thomas Anderson Quotes

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

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

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.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

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

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

Good writing is good writing, but that doesn't mean you can't orchestrate it or tweak it.

I've never written anything that I haven't wanted to write again. I want to, and still am, writing 'A Few Good Men' again. I didn't know what I was doing then, and I'm still trying to get it right. I would write 'The Social Network' again if they would let me, I'd write 'Moneyball' again. I would write 'The West Wing' again.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

I'm very involved in the writing on every level.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

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.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.