Quotes About Editing

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body -- not too little, not too much, just right.

Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

Often real life is boring and problematic. I love the edited version of it.

A good edit process turns rocks into diamonds, and every author should love that part as much as the creative phase. I do love it. It's a different side to writing. It's like the fine-tuning.

everybody thought that if only they could get in front of a camera they could show people the real them. Had they learned nothing from watching the very shows they aspired to be on? Could they not see that between them and the public whom they wished to influence stood the edit? And the edit would make of them what it pleased. It would not necessarily be brutal, it might as easily create a hero as a villain, but what it would never ever do was show anybody as they genuinely were.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

So if we're going to build new applications that require a large time investment, like say movie editing - today that doesn't matter for the enterprise desktop, but eventually it will when we get closer to consumers - you really need to have a cross-platform story.

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.'

All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.

The film's dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.

Of course, to publish something, you have to write it, polish it, then hire out the line editing, copy editing and cover design. After which, you pick your way through the minefield of conforming to the differing requirements of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, or hire someone to do it for you.

Every adaptation requires that the screenwriter make difficult choices - and in particular, difficult cuts.

Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that's hard.

I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing - it's always about gut.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.

Once you sign on as an actor, you know, you don't go to the editing room, you don't see how they cut, you don't see how they score, you don't see how they cast the rest of the movie.

When I'm actually assembling a scene, I assemble it as a silent movie. Even if it's a dialog scene, I lip read what people are saying.

I have a horror of the blank page. I simply cannot write on a blank page or screen. Because once I do, I start to fix it, and I never get past the first sentence.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.