Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

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

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

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

When a writer gets a second chance to look back on something, it's a great opportunity to say, 'Hey, this is really good, but we can do it even better.'

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

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

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.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

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

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

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

I try to write an essay every time I speak.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

When I finish my first draft I usually narrate it to some trusted friends who can give me feedback. All criticism is welcome.

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly. Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think I've got the rhythms wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in. One or two more things will happen, but not much.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

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