Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. LawrenceRead
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
Interpretation
What this quote means
Initial ideas are crucial, and no amount of editing can fix a poorly conceived draft.
T. E. Lawrence emphasizes the importance of a strong initial conception when creating a work. He suggests that while revisions can improve details and presentation, they cannot compensate for a fundamentally flawed idea or structure that fails to resonate from the start.
Themes
DraftRevisionCreationWritingIdeas
In practice
Example use cases
An author sharing this quote during a writing workshop to encourage participants to focus on their initial ideas.
More from T. E. Lawrence
All quotes →In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade.... The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance.
T. E. LawrenceRead
The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
T. E. LawrenceRead
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
T. E. LawrenceRead
We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
T. E. LawrenceRead
When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
T. E. LawrenceRead
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