"When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair." Robert Stone

"Every novelist has a different purpose--and often several purposes which might even be contradictory." Irwin Shaw

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish." Thomas Wolfe

"No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at the right place." Isaac Babel

"I have rewritten--often several times--every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers." Vladimir Nabokov

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." Charles Mingus

"I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable." Truman Capote

"I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters." James A. Michener

"How do I know what I think, until I see what I say?" E.M. Forster

"It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly." C.J. Cherryh

"To write simply is as difficult as to be good." W. Somerset Maugham

"Rules are a point to build a story around. They are a plain, solid, square foundation. If you stick to that foundation, you get a solid, plain, square building. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing notable either. To make an interesting building, you've got to go beyond that foundation, ignoring it as much as you can without having the building fall apart. The bending of the rules until the story is ready to crumble is what makes a good story--interesting, intriguing, and plausible, but almost ready to burst." David "Pasha" Morrow

"Half my life is an act of revision." John Irving

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with a first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

"Books aren't written--they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." Michael Crichton

"In composing, as a general rule, run a pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style." Sydney Smith

"There is no great writing, only great rewriting." Justice Brandeis

"Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush." Pete Murphy

"There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." John Kenneth Galbraith

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." Mark Twain

"There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them." Elie Wiesel

"I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help." Maureen Howard

"There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe." Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

"An editor must engage himself to that most difficult of human problems--making up his mind." Fredson Bowers

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile." Robert Cormier