“Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”

“6) Everybody talks first draft.”

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

“The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.”

“Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs—or ‘death professions.”

“The first payback that i would accomplish: i'd draft children from the senate and congress”

“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!”

“Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.”

“Canada has committed horrible, yet modern, violations against its natives, and for the first time, we have now drafted a U. N. resolution regarding this issue.”

“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”