Self Editing Quotes

“We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.”
― Charles de Lint, Happily Ever After

“There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread.”
― Noah Lukeman, A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation

“Self-editing a novel is like trying to put pants on a cat: yes, it's painful and time consuming, but in the end, satisfying.”
― Robert Jack

“From childbirth to our deathbeds, we seek to impose our will upon the external environment. At each milepost in life, we seek to expand our state of conscious awareness.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Our life is an unfinished manuscript; we constantly edit our evolving composition.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The projected vision in the mind’s eye of a person’s conceptual self represents a self-edited photocomposition. Our conceived self consists of an admixture of facts gleaned from the residue of yesteryear’s reality imposed over a bed of surreal images.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Next time you’re stuck in the self-editing-doom-loop before you even reach a significant milestone, just remember that it takes the unorganized parts to get to the organized part.”
― Richie Norton

“Pragmatic and cool: You are possessed by the need to make your writing function. You consider yourself neither genius nor idiot. You edit like the French recommend exacting revenge: coldly.”
― Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself