Jonathan Swift Quotes

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

You become a great writer by writing.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

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

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

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

Once an interesting idea or theme occurs to me then I would want to write a poem about it. The rest, frankly, is not difficult.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

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.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.'

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation