If I had more time, I would write a shorter story. ~ Mark Twain
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. ~ Samuel Johnson
A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. ~ Henry David Thoreau
I can't write five words but that I can change seven. ~ Dorothy Parker
To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over. ~ John Hersey
Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. ~ Oscar Wilde
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
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease. ~ Charles Caleb Colton
The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness. ~ Julia Ward Howe
Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill. ~ Edmund Morrison
Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~ George Orwell
All that matters is that, going over and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one’s story, one improves now this sentence, now that... ~ John Gardner
First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. ~ Bernard Malamud
Good rewriting demands easy, unhurried tinkering with words. Each unsuccessful try eliminates another wrong solution and leads you to the right one. I can’t emphasize too strongly how important this is, the fact that writing leads to writing, that failed attempts lead to eventual success, that the solution to a rewriting problem is made up of all the attempts that led nowhere. The trouble is that when you’re just beginning to write, you may believe that words committed to paper are sacred, fixed, immutable. But you’re not dealing with a finished, printed, copyrighted book, only with an idea, a pile of words that will change many times before they take shape as a book. ~Dorothy Bryant
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands. ~ Jacques Barzun
I have rewritten--often several times--every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers. ~ Vladimir Nabokov
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
It is perfectly okay to write garbage--as long as you edit brilliantly. ~ C.J. Cherryh
Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush. ~ Pete Murphy
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph. ~ Mark Twain
