Forty drafts

He wouldn’t go on to the second paragraph until the first paragraph was perfect, and sometimes he’d do 40 drafts of them. And so on, and each paragraph he polished as he went along to an astonishing degree. He wrote one short story a year, and sent it to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, got $1.98 for it and was happy. Strange.
—Lawrence Block on Stanley Ellin (to Ethan Iverson, on his blog, Do the Math)

(Via Rob)