Quotes About Editing

Movies are an editor's medium.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

I hate editing. I love to write, but I hate to reread my stuff. To revise.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

I've often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn't really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn't seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end, I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again, it seems a bit obtrusive.

We've got rid of subeditors because we don't need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.

Not every script that rolls in is ready to shoot. Few are, actually. So you go back and work on the thing.

You can't act for the editing. You just go in and do the scene the way you think is right.

When you cut a film, certain scenes fall away and don't fit into the shape of the movie.

It is easier to rewrite anything - even the worst writing in the world - than it is to write something from scratch.

I do a lot of screen re-writing.

Screenwriting is about condensing.

It doesn't help anybody to put out a bad script.

With my characters, I prefer to not say too much, and in fact, I tend to cut down some of the lines in most scripts I get.

A montage is incredibly challenging. When I can, I'd like to know what the music is going to be ahead of time because that will affect the beat, the pace of the montage.

I don't do any editing while we're making the movie. I sit down and watch it all with my editor, we make longhand notes on pads, and then we begin our work.

I revise obsessively. It's important to me to have a clean page.

Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

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.

Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.