Quotes About Editing

For most people, I edit. Most people are definitely getting along on the Cliffs Notes.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

You have to be somewhat ruthless with your work. You have to let things go. Even your favourite little part might not work in the end.

I might have got somewhere with 'The Ladykillers,' but forty minutes were cut. A lot of me was cut with that forty minutes.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

Writing is a piece of cake. Editing is a slab of liver.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing--I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to fix a poem.

How a word more or less, an idea omitted or added, a syllable misplaced, can transform a whole sentence and make what was before harmless, really shocking!

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

There's an old folk saying that goes: whenever you delete a sentence from your NaNoWriMo novel, a NaNoWriMo angel loses its wings and plummets, screaming, to the ground. Where it will likely require medical attention.

You first do the assembly cut, which is basically the cut that mirrors the script. You've got to start with that.

I really missed what I'd done on Rogers Cable, which was shooting and editing all my own stuff.

I get up to write while it's still dark, 5 or 5:30. I start by editing and rewriting everything I did the day before, and that gives some momentum for the day.

One thing that the audience, and perhaps critics, aren't aware of is that, especially in a film like 'Moonlight,' you always shoot a lot more footage than makes the cut of the film.

I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

My wife is more important to me than anything in the world - including music. She's a great editor and companion for all of my work and she's a great writer herself. If you live with somebody who's smart, they'll affect your thinking more than anything.

I liked film-making, but the most difficult thing was the editing. I found it tormentingly difficult.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

What does it mean for a community to edit itself like this, to so spurn the past – or perhaps fear it – that the slate must be wiped clean for each new generation? What self-hatred does this betray?

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

It didn't take me long to conclude that that was the only sensible approach to editing this book of yours. No editor can hope to impose his will on a performance like this one. We've got to let Tom run.

Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don't love you or your work.

In 1983 I lost my job—or left it. One, the other, or both. In any case, I had been part-time for a while, coming into the publishing house one day a week to do the correspondence-telephoning-meetings that were part of the job; editing manuscripts at home.