Edward Hirsch Quotes

The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.

I don't publish anything I haven't worked over 100 times.

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.

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

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

I think too many people edit themselves way too soon. There's plenty of time to edit, and it is a crucial part of it all, too.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

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.

Most good work is a combination of parts you love and parts you could do better. My constant mantra is, 'Next time, next time, next time.'

I think it's almost impossible to edit something to death. I think you can make things better almost indefinitely.

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.

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.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

Yes, the more I go through life I realize that there's really no separation between practice and art at all. The two things more and more become one rather than two different aspects of my life.

What I've learned from sketch is you can get it as perfect as you want, and it's never going to be perfect.

Writers need to be tough. This is not for the weak of will. And we have to realize that, yeah, it's never good enough. It's not like fixing a car where it's precise and we know what the end result will be definitively.

I write a melody and then change it and change it until I get it the way I like it.

At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.

I tend to write and record things quite quickly. You can tamper with things for years, and it's artistic laziness sometimes.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

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.