Quotes About Editing

In film or TV work, you can have this amazingly dramatic pause, and they'll just edit it out.

I pick up my guitar and play. Something might come, and then the pen comes out. Then an edit, until something comes out that you're actually satisfied with.

Increasingly, editing means going to lunch. It means editing with a credit card, not with a pencil.

I always write in pencil, so I can erase.

Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.

For film at the beginning of the 20th century, they didn't even know what editing was yet. Actors didn't know how to perform in front of the camera. There wasn't sound.

The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room.

I've done scenes in films that I felt like the performance was better in certain takes, but they couldn't use them because it didn't match what the person was doing when they came around and the camera was on them.

Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.

I leave my editor to put the periods and commas in.

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

I realize that I am typically vulnerable only when and where and how much it suits me. I can choose my writer words and even go back and edit.

I hate sitting around and waiting; that's why I always have an editing suite on set.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

Each movie I make has its own heroes, and the two heroes for me in 'Arrival' are Amy Adams and Joe Walker, the editor. We worked very, very hard, and it was, by far, the longest editing process.

I was a copy editor. I loved it. I love grammar. I'm obsessed. I was a bartender. I worked in a cafe. I was a dog walker. I was a babysitter. I was a tutor. Once I was asked to half-babysit, half-bartend.

The important thing is to write when your brain is at its best. Work edits or do outside reading with the rest of the day.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

I know a lot of editors who are very bitter about the directors they work with. They feel they could have done a better job, and I say to them, 'Oh really? Why don't you go try - it's not easy.'

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

We all write, but the script is a blueprint. We can lose whole scenes when we're shooting.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.

Brands are about editing.