Overwrite Quotes & Sayings

I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor. — Wolf Blitzer

The tendency when you dictate is to overwrite, because you're not counting pages, you don't really know what the hell the page count is. — Rod Serling

I think the best advice I give is to try not to write. Try not to overwrite, try not to make it sound too good. Just use your own voice. Use your own style of putting it down. — Elmore Leonard

We are saved to worship God. All that Christ has done in the past and all that He is doing now leads to this one end. — A.W. Tozer

Almost all American writers tend to overwrite, to tell too much. I get the disillusioned feeling that novels, today, are sold by the pound, like groceries. It actually takes a great deal more discipline to be able to leave out rather than to throw in everything. This means that you have to say in one sentence precisely what you mean, instead of saying sort of what you kind of mean in hundreds of sentences and hoping the sum total will add up. — Rona Jaffe

I personally think that Hollywood agencies ought to play a much better role in the development of Chinese films. Otherwise they're missing out on a lot of opportunities. — Bruno Zheng Wu

You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite - embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice. — Billy Collins

Place yourself in the background; write in a way that comes naturally; work from a suitable design; write with nouns and verbs; do not overwrite; do not overstate; avoid the use of qualifiers; do not affect a breezy style; use orthodox spelling; do not explain too much; avoid fancy words; do not take shortcuts as the cost of clarity; prefer the standard to the offbeat; make sure the reader knows who is speaking; do not use dialect; revise and rewrite. — E.B. White

Our self-acknowledgement, our dedication has to be bigger than our fear. — Rod Stryker

Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean - mending old things, preserving them, looking after them - on some level there's no rational grounds for it - ... fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn't be an object. It'd be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.
- Hobie, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — Donna Tartt

Indeed, we often mark our progress in science by improvements in imaging. — Martin Chalfie

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.' — Anna Quindlen

It had been forever since I'd felt like I wanted to take over someone's sexual history, completely overwrite it with my hands and dick and mouth. — Christina Lauren

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style. — Jorge Luis Borges

One of the many possible divisions of human beings is into those who make and those who use. — Nan Fairbrother

I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story. — Shaun Tan

I don't trust myself enough. When I write, I overwrite. Gingerbread. Too much gingerbread. Writing is probably the only hobby I have. But I wish I had another one. If I was just a little better at golf. — John Goodman

NEUROLOGY: NEW BRAIN NEURONS FOUND TO OVERWRITE OLD MEMORIES — Anonymous

The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or . . .' Mike looked at me, '. . . you write a third story. You react to the narrative that's been forced upon you.' He paused. 'You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative,' he said. 'If you believe it, it will crush you.' I — Jon Ronson

Within 24 hours of moving into a new place we overwrite it with our own microbes, turning it into a reflection of ourselves. — Ed Yong

If you're trying to write about very strong horror, very strong fear or very strong emotion, it's easy to overwrite it. — Linda Sue Park

Technically, web browsers can control what users see, and sites using Javascript can overwrite anything coming from the original authors. Browsers heavily utilize Javascript to create an interactive Internet; sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Gmail could be crippled without it. — Ben Shapiro

It's funny, most people think that revenge is a passionate affair, driven by rage and pain. But it can't be. Feelings such as those make you weak. They overwrite thought and cause reckless impulses that lead to poor decisions. — Carrie Ryan