A Quote by Edward Hirsch

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go. — © Edward Hirsch
I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.
I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.
I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done.
I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
I remember Emilio [Estevez] and I were at John's house during the rehearsal process. And John [Huges] had mentioned he wrote the first draft of Breakfast Club in a weekend. And we both at the same time went, "First draft? How many do you have?" And John said he's got four other drafts. And we go, "Can we read them?" And for the next three hours, Emilio and I read those other four drafts.
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.
wishes for sons by Lucille Clifton i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. I wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late. later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to. let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.
I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.
The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.
Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
In Quakerism, your understanding of God is revised in light of your own experience, while in research science, you revise your model in light of data from experiments.
When I'm about to blow the candles on my birthday cake and everybody is telling me I must make a wish, I just go into a tailspin. I'm thinking: what do I wish?, and I just can't seem to think about anything. Then I close my eyes, take a deep breath and there comes my wish. I don't know how to explain what goes on inside of me, but that's what happens: breathing is the key to understand what's really important to me.
For the first few years I wrote jokes and performed them word for word and then wrote tags for them and did that word for word and that worked pretty well. Now, I do almost all of my writing on stage and then record and listen for any new things and then I write those down.
I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.
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