Top 44 Rewriting Quotes

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

I don’t do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I’m too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.

It was very amusing to do ‘GI Joe: Retaliation’ scenes with Bruce Willis, who spends months rewriting his dialogue and then turns up and doesn’t say it. Part of the time, he doesn’t say anything, but mumbles and mutters.

In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.

I’m not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don’t always know what I’m feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot – like it’s coming from somewhere else.

Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I’ll spend more time on a song then. I’m more critical about it, because there’s no one else in the room to tell me, ‘That’s really not translating. I’m not getting what you’re saying.’ So, I’m constantly rewriting it, thinking, ‘No, that’s fine,’ and going back.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them ‘just right.’ But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it’s to get it written – so that you’ll have something to work with.

Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

And after you’ve done the acting, there’s a lot of places you can put your input – in the editing, in the production of it, in the rewriting of it and so on.

Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.

Tim Conway was a little different from the rest. He was always in the back of the studio building something with the prop man, rewriting his lines, or plotting our demise.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing – from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

There’s a lot going on in the world that’s very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we’re dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that’s not working. Just pare it down until it’s a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

God knows nobody hated running more than me. Because I was writing and rewriting the script, I thought that I’m going to have to run because I’m going to have to know what it feels like to run.

Don’t keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn’t setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books – and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

My records have a lot of collaborators on them, and when you’re writing a book, it’s a very insular process that’s very confusing and dark. It’s a lot of writing and rewriting in a way that I don’t do so much when I’m writing songs.

People ask, ‘What are the scientific questions you’re going to answer?’ New Horizons doesn’t have any of those; it’s purely about raw exploration… We’re not ‘rewriting the textbook’ – we’re writing the textbook from scratch.

I get up to write while it’s still dark, 5 or 5:30. I start by editing and rewriting everything I did the day before, and that gives some momentum for the day.

I didn’t know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

People are deeply interested in rewriting the established narratives and challenging what we see as the norm in every way. We want to see a new definition of beauty and sexy. We want to see different people look vulnerable and show strength and redefine what it means to be strong.

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

I do not set specific work hours as some writers do. I generally stay with a chapter until I am satisfied, do very little rewriting, and if a scene is going well, I’ve been known to keep night owl hours.

When you perform in front of an audience after only two days of rehearsal, you’re flying by the seat of your pants – particularly when they’re rewriting the show right up to the moment the camera goes on.

Artistry is important. Skill, hard work, rewriting, editing, and careful, careful craft: All of these are necessary. These are what separate the beginners from experienced artists.

But while I am proud to be an American, I am ashamed of what the Trump administration is doing in our name. It is literally rewriting the meaning of America.

For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.

It’s quite unbelievable that Charlie Crist is getting away with this reinvention of himself – this rewriting of history for blatantly political purposes. Other than his gender, the guy has flip-flopped on everything, and I don’t put that past him either.

On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I’d had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I’ve rewritten it.

I’m just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it’s random, they don’t see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

Moderating a debate means spending more time with briefing books than with your children. It means writing and rewriting and rephrasing. It means finding a way to be alert enough to notice when your question goes unanswered and nimble enough to decide what you will do about that on the spot.

Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I’m a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you’re just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that’s great. But that’s not ordinary in a day’s work.

If I were rewriting ‘Love, Medicine & Miracles,’ I might consider changing its title to ‘The Side Effects of Cancer.’ Healing is hard work, as is any change one must make in one’s life. I and others have learned, however, that the side effects of cancer may not all be bad ones.