Quotes About Editing

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started.

I've had editors over the years who couldn't find a clue if it was stapled to their butt.

With most specials, even the best comedians will tell you they could have cut 15 or 20 minutes out of it.

When you're making the film, you don't really think the audience; it's only when you start editing that you really start to became aware of your audience because you're thinking of how you communicate these ideas, and how lucid can you be, and yet stay within the language you've established.

When we first put 'Let It Be' out, I had to cut out a lot of stuff that I really like and wanted to stay in there. The stuff in the new DVD has a lot of the stuff that had to be cut out. So for me, it's like the egg is now complete.

The only advice I can give is to surround yourself with people who are friends and people who believe in you and your material and who are going to help you take it to the next level. It doesn't mean you don't listen to criticism, but you listen to it and edit it, and you figure out what you can take.

I prefer a change of surroundings anyway, and I like to be around some energy and white noise, so I usually go to a Barnes & Noble cafe or to the library on 5th and 42nd. In the afternoons, I do research, reading, editing, and play with the kids.

I think I learned most from editing, both editing myself and having someone else edit me. It's not always easy to have someone criticize your work, your baby. But if you can swallow your ego, you can really learn from the editing.

When I was about 14, I got a splicing kit, which means you could chop up the film into little pieces and switch the order around and glue it together.

I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

El matemático francés Blaise Pascal describió muy bien este problema en su célebre frase: "Lamento haber escrito esta carta tan larga, pero no tenía tiempo para hacerla más corta".

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right just before they go on to the next one.

But the difficulty of changing a typescript can also have what seems to be the opposite effect: You let go. You stop caring about certainty; you stop editing yourself, stop second-guessing yourself, and simply write—mistakes and all.

Well, you know, I've been in so many writing workshops, writing classes, and to the right of me and to the left of me, there's always somebody much more talented than I am. And what I figured out is they're not willing to go through the rejection, which is enormous, and then the compromise that comes with, you know, editing your work. And so I decided a long time ago that I didn't have to be 'talented'; I just had to be persistent, and that that was something I could control. The persistence.

Does anybody learn writing, or do they just touch someone who lets them see the power of the deleted word?

As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.

God has editing rights over our prayers. He will... edit them correct them bring them in line with His will and then hand them back to us to be resubmitted.

David Felton, his former editor at Rolling Stone, called it "probably the worst-edited and most self-indulgent work since the Bible. There doesn't seem to be any order.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

All of those words are so rude I wouldn't dream of putting them in this book.