Quotes About Editing

Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.

It takes me a long time to write, and I trust myself, so I write very sparsely, so when I do, I know it's good, you know what I mean? Rather than writing a whole bunch and having to sort out what's good and what's not.

I used to work for a succession of software editing companies that would have contracts with state and federal agencies. And I would be the documenter of meetings, sometimes doing limited business analysis. I began to become quite cynical about how the world works. It works on ineptitude and inefficiency and a kind of passiveness.

I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

Asking myself, 'Is this any good?' is pointless. It just slows down my writing, and I can't tell anyway. It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

I can lock myself for months in the editing suite with no noise or distractions. It's fascinating to see the film taking shape.

It didn't get into Sundance although I showed a rough cut which is a mistake to all filmmakers out there.

As a child actor, I had sung a song in the Bengali film 'Bhagyadebata' but it wasn't kept in the final edit.

I can hire out for editing, proofreading, formatting, and cover design, and those are fixed, sunk costs. Once those are paid, I can earn 70% on a self-pubbed ebook.

I feel like I might be a designer or stylist - or a director because I have always been super interested in cameras and editing.

I think a lot of people think it's easy to just post stuff. They think it's the easy way to fame nowadays, but it's been hard. You have to film the video, which takes forever because I'm super picky about all my takes and stuff. Then you have to edit it and upload it, and doing that three times a week is very, very difficult.

Writing can be described in two verbs: Throw up and clean up.

Now, with the message sent, the words said, she wanted to call them back, to censor, to rearrange them, to make a prettier sentence, a fairer explanation of her soul.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln's Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer's rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

Durante la primera semana en la sala de montaje, a Rebecca le producía náuseas el olor, la rapidez del ritmo, el ruido. Ruido ruido ruido. Con tantos decibelios, el ruido no es sólo sonido, sino algo físico, visceral, como una corriente eléctrica que atraviesa el cuerpo.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Dicke Bücher sind deswegen dick, weil der Autor nicht die Zeit hatte sich kurz zu fassen.

Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.

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.