If I wanted to make a quick buck, there’s far easier ways of doing it. What I want is to provoke people. If you want a hit song, all you need to do is rewrite an old song. It might have been proven to work, but you won’t be remembered the same way.
In the TV business, you’ve got to write fast, and someone will tell you, ‘Can you rewrite this episode before… 6 P.M.?’ So that’s when you rewrite it. You can’t wait for the muse to show up.
Quite often, I’ll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I’ll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.
If enough people openly engage in conduct once considered reprehensible, we rewrite the rule book and assume that God, as a good democrat, will go along.
President Obama is in violation of Section 3 of Article II of the Constitution by refusing to enforce the employer mandate provisions of Obamacare. The executive branch, which has no constitutional authority to write or rewrite law at whim, has usurped the exclusive legislative power of Congress.
I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.
For Cantonese – because there’s no standardized pinyin system – I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin.
Good musicals, a strange world, seem so easy. People say, ‘Ohhh, it’s magic.’ Nothing’s magic. A thing doesn’t jell. Adapt. Change the rhythm. Shorten the scene. Rewrite the character. Maneuver the waters. Seeming easy is why so many shows aren’t good.
I’m a perfectionist – I could rewrite forever.
When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It’s a permanent making or remaking.
Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.
I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.
I’m not patient at all. I avoid writer’s block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I’ve gotten to the next scene, I’ll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.
I don’t find writing easy. That is because I do take great care; I rewrite a lot.
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.
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.
I can create institutions, but I can’t rewrite the chips in people’s heads.
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.
It was amazing to remake and rewrite a song like ‘Sweet Like Chocolate.’ It feels like a good way to come back.
I do think – as self-serving as it sounds – that I was the right person, given the very, very strong headwind we had from the economy and our own issues, to come back and rewrite the future of the company.
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