21 Quotes From Authors On Editing, Revising & Telling The Truth At All Costs
“I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.” — Don Roff
“The story must strike a nerve in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head.” — Susan Sontag
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.” — JK Rowling
"I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged." — Erica Jong
“Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.” — Henry Miller
“I almost always urge people to write in the first person. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.” — William Zinsser
“Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action." — Kurt Vonnegut
“Cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat.” — Stephen King
"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do." — Thomas Jefferson
“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.” — Harper Lee
“Writers are always selling somebody out.” — Joan Didion
“By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.” — Ayn Rand
“In a time of universal deceit—telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — Leah Remini
“Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.” — Meg Rosoff
“Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.” — Peter Benchley
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” — William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White
“The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries.” — Henry Miller
“One of the things you learn as you get older is, you really need less… My model for this is late Beethoven. He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the late quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there… One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.” — William Styron
“Once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” — Anton Chekhov
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach