Quotes About Editing

I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called 'Film Culture.'

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I always want to cut every single line, possibly, that is mine from the script. One of the first things I do on any script is to shred, shred and shred my lines.

You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.

Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

In 'Notting Hill,' I was part of a whole plot line over six scenes that was completely taken out. That was rather depressing.

Everything's wrong on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a strange thing. Whoever gets there first, you know, they decide. Like the picture: You can't choose it! You can't be like, 'You know, I hate that picture of me doing stand-up from 2005 - that doesn't exemplify who I am.' You take it down, and someone puts it back up.

Wikipedia's funny. Some of the stuff on there - I go there occasionally - it's unbelievable the amount of stuff that people will write on there.

I don't really revise. I tend to rewrite.

You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.

I have a tendency to overcut my movies.

Sometimes you're talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

When I make films, I don't think of any other directors or their work in terms of the rhythm of the editing or the tenor of the performances.

You never really know as an actor; it's completely out of your control, in terms of editing, and music, and film stock, shot selection, and what takes they use.

The first draft often is really fast, and I'd be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

'The Newsroom' is phenomenally bad good TV. Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer are all terrific! So is the production, and the direction, and even the editing!

We all know that the 'reality' of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.

Woolf penned roughly 535 words and crossed out 73 of them, netting her 462 words for her day's work. Let's say she worked for three hours. That's about 178 words an hour including the words she deleted—and Woolf was writing at the height of her creative powers.

Hemingway said write first and then take out all the good stuff and what's left is story. (By "good stuff" Hemingway meant all the material that the author has fallen in love with—not everything that was proper for the story.)

The process of revision should be constant and endless

I learn something new every day - to edit, to take out all the extraneous matter and stress form, logic, and content. I try to play beautiful music.