“When asked about rewriting, Ernest Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that spontaneous eloquence seemed like a miracle and that he rewrote every word he ever published, and often several times. And Mark Strand, former poet laureate, says that each of his poems sometimes goes through forty to fifty drafts before it is finished.”

“It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenesuntil they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drovehim to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in worksof genius?”

“I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.”

“I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.”

“It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.”

“...Closing his eyes, he saw every smile that Rebecca had ever directed his way and knew a pang of regret. He would have liked to have held her in his arms one last time before he died.”