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The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.
Sep 21, 2025
What no wife of a writer can ever understand...is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
I try to leave out the parts readers skip.
And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Read, read read. Read everything.
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you.
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.
It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Editing might be a bloody trade. But knives aren't the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one.
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
The road to hell is paved with leeks and potatoes
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
When you catch an adjective, kill it.
The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
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