Quotes About Editing

When you have a lot going on in a scene - whether it be a lot of shots, a lot of coverage, a lot of edits, or just the amount of content - it can cover up a deficit of true feeling. But when you don't have a lot of material to work with, you really have to be sincere with everything. You really have to mean it, because there's nowhere to hide.

The role of designers and product makers is to really become much better editors. What kind of functionality is actually needed - and truly delightful - to consumers? Remove all the extraneous stuff.

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.

In the editing process, I delete what I do not want to use, move what remains around if necessary and add elements that I feel will make my visual statement as clear and understandable as possible.

Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean

When I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. But I would always say, "Well, it's not that I don't want to write for these big magazines, but you can't edit it."

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Editors always want to know what you're working on, what you're thinking about.

I'm attracted to short screenplays. Nobody really wants a film to be over two hours, or at least I don't.

I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.

I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.

You realize as a director that when you are cutting a film, you want to have alternatives. You need color and choices. You don't want four takes that are identical.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

The biggest problem is that people want to tell the whole story, and they write letters that are way longer than anything I could possibly run.

The idea that a film is created in the editing room - it's only a certain kind of movie that's made in the editing room and it's not one that I really want to see.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

Editing is a conversation, not a monologue

I was fooled a bit during 'Laguna Beach.' I was 17, 18 years old, and I thought they just wanted to shoot a documentary, and that it probably wouldn't end up anywhere, anyway. Little did we know about the power of editing. I had no idea that it was going to be the soap drama that it was, but I picked up on that pretty quickly.

Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

Editing is kind of a solitary job.