Artistic Revision Quotes

When I write and develop things myself, I might work for a while on a script from a book, and then I go back and read the book and go back into it to see if I lost something: is there something there?

There's no recreating what Michael Jackson and Diana Ross did in 'The Wiz'. We're trying to figure out who these characters are in 2015. How would these times change their motives, change the things they would say and do?

When I first drew him I had eyes in there and it didn't look right.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I just wrote a book, but don't go out and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished yet.

I'm repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it's doing to our mental process.

If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

Musical comedies aren't written, they are rewritten.

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

Any project that you shoot, it's never going to be completely finished the way that... I don't think I've ever worked on anything where every scene has been kept in the order that it was originally in, or that it hasn't been cut down in some way.

I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it.

All films created by Walt Disney at the time of his major outpouring of work were carefully crafted to fit scenes, characters, moods and situations. If these elements changed in any way, songs - no matter how good they were - were discarded. Others were written for the new scenes. Many times, character songs were dropped because characters were dropped...sequences were dropped etc.

What's great about having an audience is they can let you know what they don't think is funny, and you can just cut that out and keep trying.

What's the point of re-releasing an album? The original sounded good, why change something about it?

An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.

Revising a screenplay is much more frustrating than revising a song because you have to read through the entire work again while you are changing stuff. It is a lot easier to edit a song.

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

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.