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Who really said it

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again

Spoken by Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910 · Russian novelist & moral philosopher
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Recorded by the pianist A. B. Goldenveizer and printed in English as Talks with Tolstoi (Hogarth Press, 1923), page 26 — in an entry dated 2 August in the diary’s 1899 section, noting something Tolstoy had said the day before. The line is genuine, but it is secondhand and translated: a friend’s written-up record of a conversation, not a sentence Tolstoy published himself.

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“I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again” Leo Tolstoy, recorded by A. B. Goldenveizer, Talks with Tolstoi, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1923), p. 26. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “I can't understand how any one can write without rewriting everything over and over again. I scarcely ever re-read my published writings, but if by chance I come across a page, it always strikes me: All this must be rewritten; this is how I should have written it.”

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Provenance

Recorded at Yasnaya Polyana, 1899

Work
Talks with Tolstoi
Translation
S. S. Koteliansky & Virginia Woolf — Hogarth Press, Richmond, 1923
Entry
1899 section, entry dated 2 August — page 26
Russian original
A. B. Goldenveizer, Vblizi Tolstogo (Near Tolstoi), vol. 1, Moscow, 1922

Yesterday L. N. spoke of the process of creative work: “I can’t understand how any one can write without rewriting everything over and over again. I scarcely ever re-read my published writings, but if by chance I come across a page, it always strikes me: All this must be rewritten; this is how I should have written it… I am always interested to trace the moment, which comes quite early, when the public is satisfied; and the artist thinks: They say it is good; but it is just at this point that the real work begins!” Talks with Tolstoi, p. 26

“L. N.” is Lev Nikolaevich — Tolstoy. Note the two-word “any one” of the 1923 translation, and the second half of the thought, which the popular one-line version drops.

Scanned first edition
Read the 1923 Hogarth Press printing
Talks with Tolstoi (1923), full text at Project Gutenberg

How the line reached us

Public domain

The English text comes from Talks with Tolstoi, published by the Hogarth Press in 1923, translating a Russian diary issued in Moscow in 1922 — both well before the 1931 US public-domain threshold. Project Gutenberg lists the translation as public domain in the United States ↗.

This reflects the original work, which is public domain. If your exact English wording comes from a specific modern translation, that translation may itself still be under copyright — check the edition you quote.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What gets garbled

No rival claimant here — nobody else is credited with this line. What goes wrong is how it travels.

“Tolstoy wrote” Half-right

It is almost always presented as something Tolstoy set down himself. He did not. It is a spoken remark, written up the next day by his friend A. B. Goldenveizer, and Quote Investigator flags precisely that indirectness in its verdict ↗.

“anyone” Modernised

The Koteliansky–Woolf translation reads “how any one can write” — two words. The one-word form now standard online is a later tidy-up; you can check the original spelling in the 1923 text ↗.

A Russian remark in English clothes Translated

There is no ‘original’ English sentence to be faithful to. Every English version descends from the 1923 Hogarth Press rendering of Goldenveizer’s Russian, scanned here ↗.

Tolstoy really said it, at Yasnaya Polyana in the summer of 1899. The sentence we quote is his friend’s record of it, published in Moscow in 1922 and in English in 1923 — and Quote Investigator calls that 1923 text (or the 1922 Russian) the most accurate version in circulation ↗.

Context

A summer spent rewriting

An entry dated 31 July, just ahead of this one, finds Goldenveizer at Yasnaya Polyana working through the proofs of Resurrection. Tolstoy’s corrections were written so closely, he notes, that a magnifying glass was needed to read them, and a single printed proof-sheet could turn into three or four long pages copied out afresh — the same incident sometimes written dozens of times over ↗.

Resurrection appeared that same year, 1899 ↗. So the famous sentence about rewriting is not an aphorism composed at leisure; it is a man in the middle of the job saying out loud what the job feels like — and then adding the sting in the tail that most quotations leave off.

All this must be rewritten; this is how I should have written it.

The Hogarth Press connection, and how the line became workshop gospel

The English exists because of an unusual publishing pairing. Goldenveizer’s Russian diary came out in Moscow at the end of 1922; the following year S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf translated a selection of it, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf issued it from their own Hogarth Press in Richmond ↗. Every English version of the quotation in circulation descends from that book.

From there it moved into the literature of craft. Quote Investigator follows it into Walter Allen’s 1948 compendium Writers on Writing, a 1964 New York Times Book Review feature called “Treasure Chest,” and Donald M. Murray’s 1968 A Writer Teaches Writing — the chain of reprints is set out there ↗. Anthologising is what stripped the source off it.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Work Growth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full tracingquoteinvestigator.com

Traces the line to Goldenveizer’s diary and the 1923 Hogarth Press translation, page 26, then follows it through 1948, 1964 and 1968 reprints.
Talks with Tolstoi — full textgutenberg.org

The complete 1923 translation. The remark sits in the 1899 section, in the entry dated 2 August.
Project Gutenberg catalogue recordgutenberg.org

Bibliographic record confirming translators Koteliansky and Woolf, and public-domain status in the United States.
Scanned 1923 first editionarchive.org

University of Toronto copy of the Hogarth Press printing, with the passage on page 26.
Leo Tolstoyen.wikipedia.org

Life dates (1828–1910) and the 1899 publication of Resurrection, the book he was correcting that summer.
Alexander Goldenweiseren.wikipedia.org

The pianist and Tolstoy intimate who kept the diary and published it as Vblizi Tolstogo.

The man who could not leave a page alone

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

1828–1910 · Russian novelist, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878) before turning, in later life, to religious and moral writing that made Yasnaya Polyana a pilgrimage site for admirers, reformers and cranks alike. He was a notorious reviser — the friends and family who copied his drafts left repeated testimony to how many times a single passage could be redone. The remark about rewriting comes from that milieu: not from a published essay, but from an ordinary afternoon’s conversation that somebody happened to write down.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Talks with Tolstoi (1923), p. 26

A. B. Goldenveizer, Talks with Tolstoi, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (Richmond, England: Hogarth Press, 1923), 26. Translated from Vblizi Tolstogo, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1922).

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-cant-understand-how-anyone-can-write-without-rewriting/

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