We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Draft Quotes from Bob Schieffer, Karl-Anthony Towns, Noah Hawley, John Barton, Mike Conley Jr.. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.
When you’re in part of the same draft class, you always have a certain connection that not many other people can have with each other.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.
The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.
Coming out as a rookie, no. 4 draft pick, you expected to see some playing time.
Your life can change in one year. You can go from a nobody, not even getting any playing time on a college team, to being one of the most highly touted quarterbacks coming out of college for the draft.
I got drafted by the Titans in the sixth round. So I got drafted, but not by much. There’s nothing guaranteed for a sixth-round draft pick.
I think I’m the all-around best player in the draft.
Whenever you’re coming out in the same draft class with anybody, you’re going to be compared to them, but I’m not super worried about that.
I was halfway through a rough draft of ‘The Sisters Brothers’ when it came time to start the ‘Terri’ adaptation.
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.
I was pretty darn lucky to be selected by the Steelers. A round earlier or later in the draft and I might have been with a team that didn’t make it to the Super Bowl.
With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.
I listen to a lot of different stuff, from Mozart to Johnny Dowd to Monster Magnet. I don’t listen to music while I’m writing a draft, but I do listen to it when I’m revising.
When I’m writing the first draft, I’m writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.
I have plans of becoming a director soon. I just finished my script. I don’t know when I’ll direct the film. It is ready and has reached its third draft.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948.
I miss the preparation for game week and all the things. I miss the draft and getting prepared for that. I grew up in this business, that’s all I’ve ever known.
Being bitter about the success or draft status of someone else is like swallowing Drano and hoping the other guy gets sick. You don’t have time to fret and worry about the other guys vying for what you want.
After I graduated from Tuskegee with a masters in nuclear engineering, the draft was on so I signed up for ROTC. I figured if I had to go into the military, I’d rather go in as an officer.
I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.
I’m all for mayhem on draft day.
The draft is like game day on a 3rd-and-5. You have a lot of plays you can choose from. You go with your gut, pick and play and hope it works.
When you’re a litigator, you write so much, so many briefs, over and over again, that you’re kind of really focused on one document and have draft after draft, and really pay attention to every single word.
Growing up, I didn’t know anyone that was a watch collector or into watches, but I was always kind of curious about them. Before the NBA Draft, I knew I was going to get drafted, and I wanted to commemorate that by buying a watch.
It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.
Everyone said I would be a second-round pick or undrafted guy – that’s all I heard coming to the draft – but I had a higher faith. I knew I was way better than that, better than how people pegged me.
Really, what you should tell a novelist is, ‘Keep going until you finish the draft. Don’t show it to anyone.’
The NCAA model is outdated. If Steve Serby’s a great player in high school, and an agent wants to represent you and wants to advance you money as a loan based on the fact that you’re gonna be a high draft choice, so be it.
I revise a lot while I’m drafting, often going back to the beginning again and again to revise because I’ve changed massive things about the story. By the time I get to the end of a first draft, I’ve been through the beginning lots of times.
Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It’s taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we’ll see whatever happens with that.
I don’t want to give up multiple draft picks for a rental player who is going to be our ninth man.
You can’t draft for need. You draft for need, you get fired. Draft the best player, and if you’ve got two of them now you’ve got three of them. Just take the best players available for you.
I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don’t go out. I’m just locked away, writing. It’s a time of meditation, of going into the story.
If you’re tanking to get a higher draft pick, you really shouldn’t be playing hockey.
So in the first draft, I’m inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what’s going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
You never know what can happen in the draft.
The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Through revision is where a lot of learning happened and a lot of forgiveness happened.
Do I consider the 2003 Draft class the best ever? Yes, absolutely!
I get really tense during the first draft. Really tense. That’s not great for my family, because the first draft usually takes about a year.
The Bucks and John Hammond chose me in the draft, got me in the NBA, kept me in the team with a role from my very first season, and they are my basketball family.
I think as you’re approaching Draft day, you’re thinking about all of the possibilities, and you know that’s one way you can improve your club.
I wrote a draft of ‘Playboy’ for Warner Brothers, and it was impossible to really be independent of Hugh Hefner. In the end, Hugh Hefner was unable to take the back seat required to be able to write something about him that I felt I could do.
You hate to see yourself do one draft of a script and then have somebody else come back in and change what you’ve done.
I’ve been a lot of places and worked with a lot of different guys. High draft picks. Low draft picks.
If you had first pick in the all-free agent NBA draft, you’d take LeBron James.
I’m the only one in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that has Final Draft on my computer. Then you show up and go to any coffee shop in L.A., and there are a hundred people your age with Final Draft.
Back then I said to myself ‘screw football.’ Actually I just took part in this camp as there was nothing better for me to do. They also didn’t draft me because they thought I was too wild and undisciplined.
After 1960, anyone who wanted to discuss almost any aspect of U.S. public policy – from how to make cars safer to whether to abolish the draft, from how to support the housing market to whether to regulate the financial sector – had to speak economics.
The real question is, when will we draft an artificial intelligence bill of rights? What will that consist of? And who will get to decide that?
I normally keep a series of draft in a catalogue type of book in which I scribble, sketch and draw ideas.
When the draft comes and goes, there’s a certain set of players you acquire and there’s a whole bunch of others you had interest in acquiring. That doesn’t die.
The second draft is on yellow paper, that’s when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that’s where I cut, cut, cut.
Heart had originally relocated to Vancouver because Mike evaded the draft to protest the Vietnam war. We had to deal with a lot at that time – it was a tough period for the band.
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.
I don’t know if six picks in a draft is a record, it’s not the kind of thing I would look at, but it’s unusual.
With anybody we’re looking to draft, we do an extensive amount of work on their background, history and all that.
I read every script from beginning to end, and I read every draft that I can. I like the show, I like the character, and I want to protect both of those things.
The NBA is sometimes a crazy business, and we’ve seen crazy trades and crazy stuff happening the same night of the draft.
To a lot of people, I might just be the guy who went No. 1 in the draft. Or the guy who lost his job to Colin Kaepernick. Or the guy who helped turn a 2-14 Chiefs team into a back-to-back division champ… but then couldn’t put them over the top.
True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today’s politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game – it’s not a contact sport but a blood sport.
I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called ‘Anacoluthon.’ This will make the public think it is an historical romance.
I have always been thankful that so many of our country’s greatest leaders and statesmen were able to be on this earth at the same time and place to draft the Constitution.
I’ve never shown anybody a draft of anything.
Whether I’m writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I’m always an actor’s director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.
To draft a bill of rights that simply replicates the European convention on human rights gives the game away; namely that the Human Rights Act does, in fact, offer appropriate protection to all of our citizens according to universally accepted standards.
I have never written anything in one draft, not even a grocery list, although I have heard from friends that this is actually possible.
A peacetime draft is the most un-American thing I know.
The Draft is about the re-generation of hope and excitement for teams. Every pick your team makes could be the next Tom Brady. He could be the guy who turns around the fortune of the franchise.
If you’re not a first-round pick or you’re not 6-2, they always say you can’t be the best. But the only time there’s a weight class is before the draft. This is the NFL. It’s all about what you do. I can run past guys and get done what I need to. I can do everything the big guy can do.
In theatre, previews are the first draft of a show. I strongly believe that. The only way we can truly tell whether that draft works is by having an audience present.
My grandfather, on my father’s side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
Any time you have defensive ends going above you in the draft, when you know you put up numbers that were equal to better, you just have to use that as motivation. Whenever you’re the underdog, you have to have the right attitude and just go out there and be yourself; just play.
I do think if we had a draft again, the United States would embark on fewer wars.
As flashy as draft picks are, the reality of them helping out in Year One anyway is not necessarily the case. That’s not the reality.
I’m a wide-open book. I talk to guys coming out in the draft every year. I’m a wide-open book. I’ll give you my experiences. And I’ll tell you what I went through. But I would never project on another player that you should do this or you should do that.
Draft night for me – I watched it in my dorm in college. And it started off with just me and a friend, because I knew I probably wasn’t going to get picked right away. I thought it was going to be a little later. But, you know, you watch the whole thing. You never know what might happen, so you gotta watch.
Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.
NRDC has helped bring hope spots to more of our shared ocean waters. We helped draft and pass a California law creating a network of underwater parks stretching from the Oregon border to the Mexican border.
I’m never going to forget draft day.
Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we’ve been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
If I want to be a basketball player and you don’t draft me, what am I going to do, quit, or keep going? Knock on the next door, knock on the next door, if one of those open I’m going to go in and display my talent.
I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.
The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.
After I finished my first draft of ‘Salvage the Bones,’ I felt that I wasn’t political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.
I wrote the first draft of ‘Madame Bovary’ without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
I try not to think too much about an audience when I’m writing the first draft of a book – at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I’ve written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.
When I volunteered for the draft as a 20-year-old, mischievous guy at the height of the Vietnam War, most thought I was destined to pass from this earth early!
With TV, your first draft just doesn’t matter. It’s a skeleton, and then there’s draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It’s just a whole different kind of storytelling.
You look at my career, everywhere I went – Miami, Green Bay, Cleveland, Philly – they were always bringing in draft picks and former first-rounders and guys with free-agent deals to take my job.
I always read the translator’s draft all the way through – a very laborious business.
For the Broncos, they’re kind of in a rebuilding stage with a lot of young guys and here I am, 10 years in the league, ready to be a free agent. I think it was best for the Broncos to trade me for the draft picks and try to build.
If I follow the media and everyone that tries to set expectations for me because I’m a high draft pick, if I follow that, I will never become a great player.
What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I’m still struggling with it, 40 years later.
I just want to win. I want to mess up the draft. I don’t want the first pick.
I love CeeDee Lamb coming out of the draft. I just really did. And Amari Cooper is one of the best one-on-one route runners.
At the combine and at my workouts, I tried to be the perfect player. I tried to promote my strengths and conceal my weaknesses, and on paper, I kind of succeeded: I was the first pick in the draft. And with that, I inherited this big shiny trophy that I carried around, and it had one word engraved on it – anxiety.
I feel like whatever team drafts me I’d fit into because they’re going to get the best receiver in the draft. Regardless of if they really need a receiver early or not, the way I’m going to come in and work, they’re going to get the guy they hoped they drafted and be excited about it.
I’m not a believer in bringing back the draft. But I am a huge proponent of national service.
I’m against the draft. I believe we should have a professional military; it might be smaller, but it would be more effective.
I have all the accolades, all the experience, all the knowledge you could possibly want from a WWE number one draft pick.
I didn’t care about the draft. I didn’t want to do the workouts – they put you in two-on-two full-court drills with guards. That’s not going to help me.
I write first drafts by hand, often out of the house somewhere, and then, when I’ve got a draft, type it up and let it sit, sometimes for a long time, and then when I’m ready, I work on revision.
The Draft Model Police Act of 2006, as part of police reforms, provided for Special Security Zones to be created in the red corridor, which is a common development area. That means bringing together diverse political components but working through a coordinated bureaucracy.
I draft tweets, like, 20 times.
I have no preferred team, but everyone wants to go No. 1 in the draft. Even the guy who gets picked last in the draft wants to go No. 1. But I just know that whoever picks me, I’m going to be excited to play for that team, and I can’t wait to see myself in ‘Madden’ on that team.
The only thing you are really here to do is play football. So when you get a chance to go to the draft, and that part is over with, and you get signed on to a team, and you’re ready to go, now it’s back to everything you’ve been doing to get to this point, and that’s play football.
I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it.
No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.
I grew up in Boston in a very, very, very Marine town. So back in my neighborhood in Boston, a working-class neighborhood, when you got your draft notice, you went down, and you took your draft physical. And then, if you passed it, you joined the Marine Corps.
I always wanted to be the No. 1 pick, but come draft night anything can happen – trades, or anything like that.
Once you get into the NFL, it doesn’t matter what draft pick you are, what round you are, if you’re undrafted or not. It’s football time again. The draft, all of that doesn’t matter anymore.
I think early in my development as a quarterback, before I ever got a Division I college offer or anything, my brother was in the spotlight, first-round draft pick. People expected me to be him, but I was underdeveloped, undersized, unrecruited… so it was tough at that point.
The draft’s crazy. Everybody knows that.
You work every day with your player development, try to improve through the draft, you have free agency and you have trades. I think you have to be very aggressive in each area. Sitting back and waiting sometimes is not a good thing.
I’ve been very fortunate with my three spec scripts – which is sort of my thematic trilogy of the American Frontier. With ‘Sicario’, ‘Hell or High Water’ and then ‘Wind River’ – which is the third – there were no rewrites. It was the first draft for all three.
On draft day, I wasn’t really nervous at all. Then you turn on the draft, the first five picks go by, and then you still thinking, ‘Oh man, I don’t know where I’m going to go.’ It’s really just, by the time draft hits, that’s when you get nervous.
So, there’s no guarantee in the NFL that if you’ve got the No. 1 pick or you’ve got a top-five pick, that you’re going to be able to draft a franchise quarterback.
There’s nothing I hate more than someone who speaks in the draft room with absolute conviction, but they have nothing to back it up.
Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don’t be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love.
When it comes to the draft process, I’m going to be – I’m not going to say anything stupid – but I’m going to be my authentic, true self, and hopefully someone in an organization says, ‘That’s my guy.’
The draft not being exceptionally deep, you basically take the best player available.
At the end of the day you never know what team still wants what player. You just never know with the draft.
When I’m my own editor, there’s very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.
We just have fun with our NFL Draft coverage because we understand that it’s a long process, and there can be technical glitches that we don’t profess to ignore. During our late coverage of the Draft, we sometimes get slap-happy and distort the heads of our analysts.
It was even hard to imagine I was going to play in the NBA, because so many guys playing in Europe are not even getting to the Euroleague and everything. But everybody wants to play in the NBA. So when draft night came, it was a dream come true.
The first draft often is really fast, and I’d be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it.
My parents getting divorced gave me the opportunity to play for my granddad and to meet my wife. I fell in the draft but I ended up in Dallas.
Need always plays into your decisions more as the draft unfolds.
The first draft is usually junk. You have to work on it seven to eight times.
You want to be in the first round. That’s the dream. That’s what you see on draft night.
My first draft of Marvel Knights ‘Black Panther’ was not funny at all. They smartly rejected the entire script and counseled me to inject liberal doses of humor into very serious subject matter.
If you draft a player to be a backup, why did you draft him? You’re drafting a guy because you think he’s worthy of being drafted at that spot, but you’re also drafting him because you think he can compete. If you’re going to say, ‘This guy’s a backup,’ – really? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
It’s been a dream of mine to play in the NFL, so whenever I hear my name being talked about in someone’s mock draft or whether or not he should stay or go, it’s always interesting to listen to, but at the same time, I don’t take it for granted.
You have to build your core nucleus of your team through your draft. What that does is you basically introduce them to your culture and your environment. Then, as guys begin to perform and play to that level, then you say, ‘You know what? You guys deserve an extension, so here it is.’
To be honest, after the draft, I’m always excited.
Tom Brady is Tom Brady. He was a sixth-round draft pick. A lot of people passed up on him. He’s a Super Bowl Champion, Super Bowl MVP. He’s been in a bunch of Super Bowls, and he could care less about all of that. He just cares about winning the next game.
I still think that, uh, the original draft from ‘The Room’ was brilliant in its own way. It made me laugh, which is – which is a good thing. It got a reaction.
I cried most days working on the first draft. The last scenes were the hardest. I had a feeling where I wanted to end – the exact note – but I couldn’t see how to get there. Sarah Murphy, my editor, asked the right questions to help me. I think of ‘The Bear’ as a hopeful book.
For me, and I said this even before the draft, I think being with the same team for my whole career would be something that would be very special to me because, especially at the quarterback position, that means that we won a lot of games, hopefully Super Bowls, ’cause that’s the end goal.
I’ve watched ‘Ringu’ probably three or four times before writing the first draft of ‘The Ring.’ And then I’d seen ‘Ringu 2’ I think once.
We may need to change the way we think. As in Israel, I think there should be a mandatory draft, where you go away for the service of your country for three years.
Does the draft really matter? At the end of the day, at the end of your career, at the end of time, does it really matter?
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it’s something that made every American take war seriously.
I was fortunate enough to do a docu-series throughout the draft process, but I did that to show the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters.
I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing’s messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
Our plan is to struggle against terrorism and have security for the country and help draft a democratic constitution as soon as possible.
Everything I write, I’ve written the first draft in Austria.
I’ll play for whoever drafts me. I’m just not going to be presumptuous about what they want to do. It’s the draft.
I finished the rough draft of ‘Crying in H Mart’ in July of 2020. My editor had it for five to six months, so I was free from it for a little while. I decided to take that time to start working on a new album.
In 2007, when I was a lawyer for the public interest group Free Press, I helped draft the complaint to the FCC against Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent and other technologies.
My mom was sarcastic about men. She would tell me Adam was the rough draft and Eve was the final product. She was a feminist minister, an earth mom who wore a bra only on Sundays.
I remember during the draft I went to see a lot of organizations. But after you play in New York, you don’t really want to go anywhere else. The people around are so cool.
I fell asleep during the draft, actually. I woke up, and I was picked No. 48. I didn’t even know what number I was picked.
The first draft of ‘Ex Machina’ is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.
I’m not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.
I was thinking about the NBA after my fourth year, but I also realized I could get my master’s paid for and have another year on the court to raise my draft stock even higher. I felt if I could do those things, I could have my cake and eat it, too.
I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.
Prior to the draft I met with the Vikings about four or five times.
I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn’t figure out that mathematics of the story first.
I have a lot of love for the Golden Bears. I was upset and disappointed with the rumors that came out when it came time for me to enter the draft. There were a lot of negative things said about me that hurt me, that I wasn’t a team player and I didn’t work hard.
I think that many of the issues they were facing in South Africa were the same as those I was singing about. Conscription, resisting the draft, government repression – I mentioned all those things in my songs.
The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it’s very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.
I have always had great respect for those who served. In my time, we had the draft.
Let go of the idea that somehow you can outsmart a first draft. Because I have never met anybody who can.
In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for president via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly.
I used to tell people that in 2012 when I was trying to understand where am I most likely to be drafted and who are the three or four teams that have pursued me the most and it would make sense that they would pick me, I never thought of who would be least likely to draft me.
To tell you the truth, I don’t edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that’s the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.
Rather than waiting to restore fiscal responsibility after we pass legislation, we must work to ensure we remain committed to it as we draft legislation.
I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I’ve since learned to read utter crap while I’m writing: pulp is the thing.
That summer after the draft was probably the most fun I’ve ever had, because all I had to do every day was wake up and go work out for four or five hours. I got to play some golf, which I love to do, too, and then got to hang out with my family.
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.
I had friends around campus and great teammates. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t expect to be regarded and scouted as such a high pick, so it was a crazy twist to reality. I’d always wanted to make the NBA. It was my dream. Then all of a sudden, people were telling me I’d be the fourth pick if I entered the draft.
I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
I didn’t know there was an NBA draft. But in my mind, I was always telling myself, one day, ‘I’m going to be in professional basketball.’ And I believed it. One day, I will. I believe this every day. I think about this every day. I was going to do whatever I had to do to be there. And it comes true.
Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I’m going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them ‘just right.’ But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it’s to get it written – so that you’ll have something to work with.
I got hurt my senior year of college. I ended up breaking my fifth metatarsal after I pulled out of the Draft. That was a good experience for me to kind of find myself, figure out a plan for post-basketball because obviously it doesn’t last forever.
To expose a first draft to anyone’s ears other than your own is indecent.
If you’re having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you’re trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don’t look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.
So I’m going to tell you, it’s going to be a good year. There are good players all over this country, and it is our job as a scouting department to find them, draft them, sign them, develop them, and help us to continue to win championships. So it’s going to be a good year.
There’s obviously different roads you can go down. And I think if you study it, how teams are built – and I went through this in Minnesota – the draft is critical, free agency is critical, player development is critical and trade opportunities are critical.
If you look historically at the draft at quarterbacks in the top 10, about half of them flame out very quickly.
I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn’t work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
Like any year, any year with any team, you’re always going to look to the draft to help strengthen your roster and free agency.
When I finish my first draft I usually narrate it to some trusted friends who can give me feedback. All criticism is welcome.
If journalism is the first draft of history, then talk radio provides an early glimpse into how the meaning of political events will be spun for ideological and partisan purposes.
Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them. I sincerely believe that reinstating the draft would compel the American public to have a stake in the wars we fight as a nation.
I don’t write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.
‘City of Bohane’ has been optioned for film, and I’ve finished a first draft of the script.
New Yorkers should know that no one in the Administration, at the Department of Defense, or at the Selective Service System is advocating the reinstatement of the mandatory draft in any form.
We draft mostly high school kids and we have one of the finest, if not the finest, player development programs and coaching staffs and we teach our players the right way to play. We also have a game plan in scouting, and there are certain types of players that we look for.
Once I’ve got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I’ll check my research.
Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.
When I came to New York for the draft in ’89, they told me I should be like 10 and 15, and it didn’t happen. So I was very disappointed, like, nobody wants me.
I’m sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I’m useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.
The Indians could not undertake any widespread cultivation of the plains not only because they lacked iron tools but also because they had no draft animals.
I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.
I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.
I have not seen a true grounds-up revolution from a bunch of companies getting together. It takes one company to put it together, then people draft off of that, but they don’t build it top to bottom with a specific vision.
I’m working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it’s hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.
I have never had a problem with national service. I am not sure the draft is the way to go about it, but I am positive that you live in a society and you take from this society, which every citizen here does. You owe something back to this country, and that should be paid back in some form of national service.
It’s 2010. I’m forty-three years old. I’ve just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it’s a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I’m finally coming into my own.
I remember placing the New Era cap on my head at the 2017 NBA draft – that moment changed my life. I’m excited to be a part of a brand that has a strong sport heritage and look forward to being a part of their history.
Sometimes, obviously it’s an incentive to tank if you have the opportunity to get those high draft picks.
In the original draft I was 27 and Peter was 55 in the script. That’s not the same as a guy in his 40s and a dad in the end of his 70s. It’s a different point in both our lives.
I’m OK with having a really good football player with a chip on his shoulder because he’s going to come to prove to not only the people that didn’t draft him, but himself, that I’m a pretty good football player.
I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.
I think teams make the same decisions every year based on the same information and based on the same decision-making. I think a lot of it is flawed, but it’s the way they draft.
I don’t write a play from beginning to end. I don’t write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It’s not all in ether. It’s on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what’s missing, and that’s my first draft.
Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn’t do this out of compassion or guilt. It’s done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.
When a car’s ahead of you, as long as you can see it, you get a tow, just like the draft in NASCAR. Even if it’s a long ways down the track, it punches a hole in the air that has to help. When you’re running alone, you can feel the difference, and it shows on the clock, too.
I will take a draft to the Yankees or to the Mets. A draft for president is not conceivable.
During the Vietnam era, more than 30,000 draft dodgers and deserters sought harbor in cities like Montreal and Toronto, where public opposition to the war was strong and most residents didn’t question their motives.
Everything with the draft process, from the combine to visits to pro days, that’s great but it’s not football.
Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.
I didn’t know if I was going to be drafted, period. I remember sitting there and just praying that whatever God has for me to happen, and I didn’t get any calls from anybody else the whole round. And then I got a call from New England five hours after the draft started.
When I’m writing a first draft of a script, I can disappear into that for two, three months exclusively.
I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.
I’ve been saying it before the lottery, before the Phoenix Suns even had the No. 1 pick. I’ve just been talking it into the existence. I’m not saying I’m the best player in the draft and trying to be cocky like that, but I was just saying I’m going to be the No. 1 pick, regardless.
I had talked to a lot of people in Golden State’s front offices before the draft. They said they liked me, but they had a lot of guards, so I didn’t think that I would end up there.
Writing the first draft of a new story is incredibly difficult for me. I will happily do revisions, because once I can see the words on the page, I can go about ripping them up and moving scenes around. A blank page, though? Terrifying. I’m always angsty when I’m working my way through a first draft.
When I came out in the draft, people kept asking me, ‘So are you a small forward or a power forward?’ and I was like, ‘I’m a basketball player.’ Period.
I wasn’t worried about my draft position. I was just taking it easy come, easy go.
The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes – but that’s the same with any creative outlet.
In 1969, we decided we had to do certain things technically to win, and we decided to do them then, even though we knew some of the personnel couldn’t do it. In other words, instead of adapting the system to the players, we just installed our system. Then we set out to fill our team through the draft.
A lot of people didn’t really think I’d make it until the draft. The people that hate, that’s a part of it. It makes me go out there and prove everybody wrong. I don’t really get caught up in what they say.
First of all, I want to thank the Buccaneers for giving me the opportunity and for picking me in the draft. This is the nature of the beast, though, and this is a new start for me. I wish them the best of luck, and I am just glad to be a Bear.
I’m a big believer in puking out all your thoughts in a single sitting and getting some version of the work down, because the alternative just prolongs the agony. The first draft is hideous and ajskdlkdfksjdfslfjk, but it’s just a map for where the big blocks go.
You’re in pro football, it’s kind of interesting, because when you win, you draft last. In college football, you recruit. You gotta go after guys.
When I wrote ‘High Stakes,’ I followed the classical format. I wrote an outline first, then a first draft, then got feedback and rewrote and rewrote it. I’d never done that before.
I’d get rid of it, just get rid of the draft altogether. We’d just deal with the salary cap.
During my draft process, I had Seattle come and work me out. This is one of the places where I thought I might be drafted. I’m glad it worked out I’m here.
Francisco Garcia could have been a high draft choice last year, probably in the 20s. He’s the best wing player I’ve ever coached. But he’s done it the right way. He knew he had to work on his body to become a good pro. When he goes into the pros, he’ll be physically ready.
I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam.
There are producers, like the late Geoffrey Perkins, who have truly great ideas that will fire up your synapses and show you that handing in your first draft is not the end of a horrible process, but the beginning of a beautiful one.
Central African farmers don’t have any animal power because sleeping sickness kills all the animals – cattle, the horses, the burros and the mules. So draft animals don’t exist, and farming is all by hand, and the hand tools are hoes and machetes.
You can’t just hope you draft well and not go after free agents and you end up in the Super Bowl. You got to go get it.
I don’t have any respect at all for the scum-bags who went to Canada to avoid the draft or to avoid doing their fair share.
I’m a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn’t just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.
By that time I was thinking a little about pro ball and hopeful that someone would draft me.
I’m happy to be here at the NBA Draft no matter where I go.
I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I’m teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.
I was called fool’s gold. That’s what I was called in the draft combine. That’s how I remember it. I took it personal.
To me the only real star of the movie is the writer. And I work with writers very closely, from outline to first draft and on to the seventh draft, whatever it takes. Then my job is to support the director to make the best movie we can. Some producers try to go past them, but my job is to support them.
A universal draft is most often the instrument of Third World dictators.
My philosophy is that you don’t motivate players with speeches; you have motivated players that you draft. That’s where they come in, and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.
It’s hard to change a roster around. You’ve got to hit your draft picks right, you’ve gotta hit free agency right, and a team’s got to fit together.
I believe an invitation from the Commission on Presidential Debates is similar to a draft notice – a civic responsibility.
If you would have told me when I was a kid that I would be sitting here with an ACC championship and been drafted in the fourth round of the Major League Baseball draft, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.
I had that mindset that I feel that I am the best prospect in the draft, but everything happens for a reason.
I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they’d like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.
I talk about the NFL Draft on a daily basis because this is the sport I cover – this is the show I do – and I talk about everything that’s taking place every single day.
It’s a great opportunity to get picked top 10 in the draft. It’s just a dream that I’ve always had.
They don’t draft you to sit there and stand on the sideline.
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.
There’s a lot of really good players in the draft and we’re all looking to make a name for ourselves at the next level. I guess we’ll find out 10 years down the road and there’s gonna be discussions throughout time about it, but we can’t control that.
I learned that Yao Ming broke his navicular bone like five days before the 2009 draft. From that moment on, all I thought about was going from zero stars to one star. How do you do it?
When I did the zero draft for Six of Crows,’ it was a very organic process.
Unfortunately, when we had a No. 1 draft pick, there wasn’t an Andrew Luck out there. A lot of that’s pure luck.
When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.
I think I wrote the first draft of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ in ’79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.
If I could start with anybody, I would initially draft Tom Brady. Then I would go get Ray Lewis, and then maybe an offensive lineman, or somebody like Adrian Peterson.
The main reason why I would even potentially go to the NFL Draft is for my family.
LeBron had a pretty bad draft suit.
When I graduated from Utah, I was headed into the biggest job interview of my life, the NFL Draft.
We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it’s okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It’s okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you’re human.
When you’re 20 and going to the draft, everybody is telling you what you should wear. I kind of succumbed to peer pressure on that one.
I’m careful about speaking about this, but I believe it is only natural to accept the mandatory military duty, and I will go when I receive a draft notice, no matter when that is.
The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers – one that would protect Americans’ liberty at all times – both in war, and in peace.
This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one.
The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.
Football, we pretty much control what we do and how we react, and there are two days we couldn’t, on the draft and on the selection for the Hall of Fame.
There was a story that came out that Jimmy Garoppolo was one of the first guys to text Trey Lance. That’s just the type of guy Jimmy is. He’s not going to shy away from adversity, shy away from a draft pick.
A draft doesn’t produce the people we need to satisfy our real manpower shortage. We need specialists to keep our jets flying.
I will never support a draft.
One of the things I noticed more in this draft than in any recent drafts was the importance of the character issue. Players who had baggage, like Justice, fell much farther than his talent dictated. But a lot of coaches didn’t want to take the chance.
Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that’s a disappointment.
Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.
I have worked out with the Thunder, Lakers, Knicks, Grizzlies, Spurs, and a few others before the draft. I have worked out primarily against shorter and supposedly faster players in these workouts.
Going to the draft, I took two years off to serve my church and my God. There were no secrets, there was no deception; I didn’t ask anyone to be drafted No. 2.
There is a lot of information to know, but I prepare for the NFL Draft by coming to work every day.
To add a player in the draft is something we always look forward to.
Honestly I’m excited for whatever team wants to draft me, and I’m excited to make an impact right away.
The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story’s flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it’s almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you’ve already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
I grew up in a very high-achieving family. I have a brother who’s a Harvard-educated cardiothoracic surgeon. My other brother is a two-time Olympian, fifth-round draft pick for the Philadelphia Eagles, and an entrepreneur and philanthropist.
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
The baseball draft is very different from the NBA or the NFL.
I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it’s my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it ‘first’ and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, ‘You’ve passed your deadline.’
I was part of the draft resistance movement in LA where we did demonstrations at the draft centre and burned our cards and made a lot of trouble on campus.
Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.
Six years after I wrote the first draft of ‘Plan B,’ I received my first paycheck as a writer. It included both the $3,000 in deferred option money as well as half the fee for performing the initial rewrite. The amount was scale according to the Writer’s Guild guidelines, but a lot, according to me.
I don’t like re-writing very much. The fourth and the fifth draft – that’s too much like work. There’s not much inspiration about it, and the lawyerly side kicks in – being very careful and somewhat technical.
If you went and found my draft bio, I wasn’t supposed to play left tackle, and I sure as hell wasn’t supposed to play it for 12 years.
Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can’t even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I’m not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it’s torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
I write every first draft – almost every draft, but certainly the first – by hand on blank white pieces of paper, so I don’t know how long it is as I’m writing; it just piles up, and then I input it all in my computer, and I learn how long it is.
Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.
I see myself as the No. 1 player in the draft, but it is what it is. You can just take it day-by-day, put in the work, and the draft is going to be the outcome of whatever the draft is.
You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.
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!
The type of athletes we draft still need types of versatility on the defense side of the ball, run the offense. You should still be concerned on the offense side of the ball.
My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of ‘War and Peace’ – and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she’s a midwife rather than a surgeon.
I have watched the NBA draft just about every year, so to see myself up there, that is something I am excited about.
It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.
Maybe the answer to Selective Service is to start everyone off in the army and draft them for civilian life as needed.
In high school, I told my trainer Keith I wanted to be the No. 1 player in the country and the No. 1 draft pick.
I want to warn anyone who sees the Peace Corps as an alternative to the draft that life may well be easier at Fort Dix or at apost in Germany than it will be with us.
Risk takes on a lot of different forms, be it financial, the draft slot, something physical.
I don’t fiddle or edit or change while I’m going through that first draft.
Sometimes you can line up with a quarterback after getting traded or going to a new team, whether it’s the draft or whatever, and it not go smooth.
My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.
I have to do draft after draft… It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
From watching the draft and following the NFL closely, anything can happen in the draft. But to me, it’s not where I get drafted that matters to me, to be completely honest.
I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me.
After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or a novel, I find that when it’s still fresh in my mind I’m either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I’m unable to make substantive edits of any value.
It’s been super weird because you have zoom meetings and then it’s like high school again, I’m stuck at home with my parents and the only time I get out of the house is to workout. Let’s just say it’s not been how I envisioned my pre draft process going.
