Quotes About Editing

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.

Because the filming process was so organic and there was no script, the film [Dream of Life] was literally telling us what it wanted to be in the editing room.

I would bring Patti [Smith ] in to the editing room [working on the Dream of Life] and say, "This is a great moment for a voiceover, or a poem," and then we'd bring in some sound design.

Angelo Corrao was our editor [in Dream of Life], and he was just so diligent and so old-school in the way he looked at editing. He would take my far-out ideas and tame them and make sense of them.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

Art isn't really about raw unmediated access to reality: that's reality. You get that at the bus stop. Art is about interpreting reality, pointing up certain aspects of it, focusing attention. Editing." Most

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Reality does get a bad rap. But I'm not concerned about it 'cause I know who I am. They can edit it, but you are in charge of what you do.

I think that's what most of us rappers do too often. We put too much information in some of our albums that could actually be on the next ones.

It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down.

When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

When it comes to the ratings, I don't know what the rating system is. So when it comes to me, I've learned, with the little experience that I have, that when I feel really good about a movie in the editing room, it works. And when I've felt like a movie wasn't working, it didn't work.

I write exactly what I think. If it's a raw subject, I write lots of things and then pull out all the fluff words.

When I get started each day, I read through and correct the previous day's 2,000 words, then start on the next. As I reach that figure, I try to simply stop and not go on until reaching a natural break. If you just stop while you know what you're going to write next, it's easier to get going again the next day.

I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.

Normally, I have a lot of alpha readers on my books. These are people that, once I finish a novel, I let them look at it and give me a reader response.

We were constantly appealing for funds from readers when I edited 'The Black Dwarf' in 1968-69.

I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.