Quotes About Editing

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Toni Morrison read The New York Times every day with pen in hand, making corrections she felt necessary, deleting words or inserting them as she went along.

as in Welles' pictures (or in Renoir's) through depth of focus but by virtue of a diabolic speed of vision which seems for the first time to be wedded here to the pure rhythm of attention. Undoubtedly all good editing takes this into consideration. The traditional device of shot-reverse-shot divides up the dialogue according to an elementary syntax of interest.

it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

Finally, the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism

You've got to kill your darlings.

The most difficult thing about writing, I'm discovering, is not the act of constructing the sentences themselves. It's deciding what to put in, and where, and what to leave out. I'm constantly second-guessing myself. I chose the accident, but I could just as easily have started with any point during my thirty-five years of life before that. Why not start with: " I was born in the year 19-, in the city of -?

Getting out any weekly magazine requires many hours of reading, choosing, discarding, and thinking beyond the obvious.

When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

Television is such an evolving medium. When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

If you look at 'West Side Story,' a lot of those numbers are actually pretty cutty, but the cuts are always musically motivated.

If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.

I have been a huge fan of Gautham; I remember him editing 'Kaakha Kaakha' and I used to pray for it to become a superhit.

Writers, directors often can get too precious with their words.

The more powerful you become, the less likely it is that people will tell you the truth. It must be why the 'Harry Potter' books become so bloated as the series progresses; think of the beautiful, precise editing of books 1-3 drowned in a mire of sycophancy and yea-saying.

When I was 11, at prep school, I was starring in the school play, editing the school magazine and standing as Conservative candidate for the 1959 mock election.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

I don't like fast cuts. I'd rather shoot something that dances to the music.

You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.

There are so many decisions in making a movie.

I often found that my favorite scene that I shoot is often one that I cut out, like in 'The Last Castle' and 'The Contender.' If you look at the deleted scenes, some of the best scenes never made it into the film.