Quotes About Editing

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: "This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.

I didn't obscure anything, I just left it out.

A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he's really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice.

A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he's really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice.

He revels in all the empowering conveniences that the iPod offers, like being able to 'correct' albums by removing their weak tracks (even on Beatles LPs, where he removes all the Ringo songs)

I do a lot of rewriting. It's very painful.

Someone should take a vacuum cleaner to his sentences.

The writer chooses details in accord with the narrative voice most fit to tell the story, sensing how much is needed and what might need to be cut.

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

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

Write the book the way it should be written, then give it to somebody to put in the commas and shit.

Bucknell joined their family, editing her

I edit with a pen, I write on a computer. I've always had trouble with pencils because they get dull so quickly, or they just break, and then there's that ­awful shuddery feeling when you're trying to write with a couple of scraps of wood poking out.

What do I love most? Working with words. Words in a sentence are like pieces of a puzzle; you try out a whole bunch, then turn them this way and that until they fit into the whole. Creating flow is crucial. There's nothing like the moment when, after working and reworking a sentence, everything falls into place, and you know that it's right. What I do love least? Touring. It's grueling, time-consuming, and lonely.

returned to the typewriter, angrily erasing and correcting each mistake she'd made, desperately wishing she could as easily wipe out her mental image of the man in her carriage house.

I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque.

The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.

To receive footage that has been shot with editing in mind, it is a blessing.

I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.

When you work on something in an edit room with just a couple of other people, you never know how it is going to be received.

I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.