Below are some of my favorite quotes about writing and revision, about the whole process we endure to write one, single, perfect sentence. It is both achingly painful and joyously satisfying. I hope you'll find one or two to guide you on your journey. --Sandy
"The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the BIG thing, and you work off the resonance." Reynolds Price
T“That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.” Tim O'Brien
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” - Annie Proulx
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” -Anne Frank
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Mark Twain
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” Robert Frost
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” Anais Nin
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” Sylvia Plath
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” Madeleine L'Engle “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” Stephen King
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”Toni MOrrison
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” J.D. Salinger
“When an old person dies, it’s like losing a library.” Old African Proverb
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” William Wordsworth
“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.” Stephen King
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I like to push language toward poetry, to activate the dormant possibilities inherent in it. That’s what great literature does, in my mind—it re-creates the language, it mines the beauty that is sometimes deeply buried inside mountains of clichés and platitudes." Aleksandar Hemon
"You get really honest with folks, and they'll turn on you every time. Ryan Crawford
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” Stephen King
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekhov
“The first draft of anything is shit.” Ernest Hemingway
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Thomas Mann
“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.” Stephen King
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” F. Scott Fitgerald
" Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Stephen King
"I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group." Patrick Rothfuss
"I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft." John Jeremiah Sullivan
"Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing. " Bernard Malamud
" Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times. " Patricia Reilly Giff
"So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to acrete meanings as you go." George Saunders
" In the process of revision I discover things." Rita Dove
"Finding pleasure in revision is the thing I would most strongly advise to people. It's not something I did as a younger writer; I learned it over time. "Antonya Nelson
"this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months." Margaret Haddix
"It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied." Hemingway
"Constantly. More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina. I can rewrite sentences over and over again, and I do. . . . And I think what I've always recognized about writing is that I don't put much value in so-called inspiration. The value is in how many times you can redo something. " John Irving
" I have rewritten--often several times--every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers." Vladimir Nabokov
" I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words. " Joseph Pulitzer
“Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings)…I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: ‘Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.’ — Stephen King