"If you can still tell what's red ink on your manuscript and what's your own blood then you haven't finished editing."

"I work hard at the words, rewriting, finding the right words, the ones where no other word would suit, only those words."

"The most important thing is to tell your story the way it needs to be told without shortchanging the reader or keeping gratuitous bits that could be streamlined to keep the pace moving."

"A writer should never give readers information they don't need.  In any given story it's either important or it isn't, and it's my job to feel out the difference."

"Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would."

"What I've found over the years is that I've never regretted anything I've ditched—I've only regretted the stuff I've left in."

"You have to be ruthless.  There comes a point when you know in your gut something just isn't working, or isn't as good as it should be."

"We want the art, that's what we're aiming for.  We're aiming to suppress our cautious editor who always tells what to do.  I think one of the big writers said, 'Write drunk, edit sober.'  I say: Write fat, edit lean.  In that first draft, put all the extra stuff in, anything that comes into your head.  What happens is we self-edit as we're writing—Oh, that's not going to make it in the final.  Don't worry about that.  Put it in.  It's going to add flavor, and it's going to inform the text.  Once you're done with that, then go through and put it on a diet.  You know, we want a fat baby.  They've got the chubby cheeks, the chubby arms, the chubby fingers—we love that!  That's good.  When the baby grows up, then we want the lean muscle."

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

"Imagine sentences instead of writing them... Keep them imaginary until you're happy with them.  Revise at the point of composition.  Compose at the point of revision.  Accept no provisional sentences.  Make no drafts.  And no draft sentences.  Bring the sentence you're working on as close to its final state as you can before you write it down and after.  Think of composition and revision as the same thing."

"[The airplane pilot] said, 'Why do you think I do this job?  It's for the seven minutes of takeoff and the 11 minutes of landing.  The computer does the rest.'  And to me, that's like writing.  You do it because you get this great idea, and you have the excitement of the first draft, but most of it is revision, and doing the wrong stuff, and fixing and fixing.  And then, you get the landing.  It's very much the same."

"The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting... Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur."

"The first comment I got from my editor was that it was the most linear plot she'd ever read, and she could predict exactly what was going to happen, and I needed to rip the whole thing apart and redo it.  So that's where I got with outlining."

"Read the first five pages. Count clichés. If you find one, the buzzer goes off: it's not a serious novel. A serious novelist notices clichés and eliminates them. The serious novelist doesn't write 'quiet as a mouse' or paint the world in clichéd moral terms. You could almost just substitute the adjective 'cliché-free' for 'serious.'"

"I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks."

"The only reason writers publish is to stop rewriting."