Quotes About Editing

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

It's a really exciting thing to collaborate with production designers, cinematographers and gaffers and costume designers and editors and composers.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.

Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.

First, I'm trying to edit down about 7 hours of material which I made prior to the Cop days and find some way to get it out. This stuff is pretty out there, mostly sonic collages and tape manipulations.

When I was about 19, I shot a tape of me doing magic just to people on the streets, and I would edit together all the reactions and I kept pushing this idea, and then ABC came on board and made my first show.

My mom did this really cool thing: when 'Pulp Fiction' came out on video, she made, like, a 'mommy edit.' She took two VCRs and dubbed 'Pulp Fiction' from one tape to the next and edited out all the parts she thought were unsuitable for a kid. It was basically, like, the opening and ending credits.

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Editing cannot be taught. Developing your own taste cannot be taught.

When we were working on 'Taxi to the Dark Side,' we would purposefully not show it to certain people in the cutting room, because we would include a lot of horrible material and would need a fresh pespective. They would look at us and say, 'Are you out of your minds? You can't include that!'

I made shorts films, learning the dos and don'ts. Most importantly, I've been editing all these short films. Nothing can teach you filmmaking like editing can.

There are courses you can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but I don't think they teach you how to edit.

There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.

In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.

biography much easier. On a personal note, I should like to thank Stanley R. Moore, Dr. Michael Rostafinski, and John Tebbel for advice and information; my wife and "first reader," Reade Johnson; and my editor at John Wiley, Hana Lane, for

I read a lot of bad books- books so bad that they aren't even published,which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. - The Ghost, Robert Harris.

So," said Ruth, "how bad is it?" "You haven't read it?" "Not all of it." "Well," I said, politely, "it needs some work." "How much?" The words "Hiroshima" and "nineteen forty-five" floated briefly into my mind. "It's fixable," I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually.

The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop.

Harry Kane used a word your publisher will cut.

Quit drawing out the story

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural.

Assuming that the manner in which something is said is often as relevant as its content, I have edited as little as possible, changing sentence structure only when clarity would be otherwise sacrificed, and revising unorthodox spelling on the premise that linotype operators have a difficult enough life as it is.