Thomas Perry Quotes

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

One of the biggest problems for beginning writers is this need to over-explain.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

One of your jobs as a writer is to cut out the noise. All you have is your instincts and your process.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

When you're just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

I read my books aloud before they were published.

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

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

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

I don't write books inadvertently.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

I put the words down and push them a bit.