Quotes About Editing

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)A good novel editor is invisible.

Further editing deepens a story.

That's the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

I've always felt that photographers who say, "They used the wrong picture," have only themselves to blame. They gave them the "wrong" picture. I didn't worry because I only gave them pictures that worked. It's my obligation to take out all the "wrong" pictures.

Every edit is a lie.

Consider Microsoft Word. Until the mid-1990s, repaginating a document was a foreground task. You had to invoke the Repaginate command and then wait many seconds—for long documents, minutes—for it to complete before you could return to editing the document.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages, which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

Worse, their relationship with their work is often emotionally violent. You want to make something? You are told to open up a vein and bleed. Time to edit your work? You are instructed to kill your darlings.

Chroniclers can edit names out as easily as visionaries can noise them abroad.

What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

One of the biggest challenges for a writer of nonfiction is to avoid using too much of his or her hard-won material. A great and enduring book isn't comprehensive; it is highly, even ruthlessly, selective, zeroing in on the most evocative and illustrative moments while dispensing with the clutter that might prevent the high points from resonating to maximum effect.

Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen?

With VR, you are directing in a 360-degree environment. The biggest challenge is that the viewer can look anywhere. They might look at the the weakest moments, the very things you edit for TV. You don't control where they look.

The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.

In the web products and services world, you have a real-time interaction with your customers, and then a real-time editing of how you as a company are doing.

While there are certainly food-focused content out there on the Web and on TV, most of this content need to weave through many layers of editing before it reaches the viewer.

I love being on stage if I'm not on a set. If I'm at home, I'm usually in my office editing or reconstructing my website or whatever it may be. I just love putting creativity into a performance, so if the right script comes along, and I certainly am reading comedies and dramas now, then I'm ready willing and able to give it a shot.

My dad grew up as a computer programmer, so he always had random computer software, and I started opening up editing software at age 12 and figuring out how to build websites.

I begin early in the morning and edit everything I wrote the previous day. I write until mid-afternoon. My goal is to write a chapter per week, and if I am not finished by Friday, I write on the weekend. I get a lot of fan emails and answer them every day. In the late afternoon, I attend to the business of publishing, etc.

Each week, we might write 500 jokes for 'Weekend Update,' and ultimately, we can only do about 10.

You could do a scene that takes 15 hours, but in the movie, it's only 10 minutes. The scene where they put the sauce poisoning in; it took eight hours.

Five hundred words a day is what I aim for. And I don't go on to the next chapter until I've polished and polished and polished the one I'm working on.