Quotes About Editing

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

If you are a professional writer—i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed—emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.

Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

My wife saw a mug somewhere that says, 'I'm silently correcting your grammar.' I think that is perfect thing for me.

None of my kids want to be actors. They are actually very interested in being musicians. I think they like the process of film from the outside. Mad is interested in editing. Pax loves music and deejaying.

I was disappointed with 'My Friend Pinto.' Everyone put a lot of effort into it but the final product was something no one was ready for. The story was altered and a lot of scenes were edited. I got a lot of flak for my performance.

I will never apologize for selective editing to make myself look better.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that writing is mysterious; you don't ever truly know where it is coming from, so don't edit yourself line by line. Don't get in your own way. Whatever is truly there at the core, that is your voice.

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

Life only has narrative when we frame it and edit it and call it certain things.

An authentic and honest brand narrative is fundamental today; otherwise, you will simply be edited out.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

A lot of people in Nashville think that the best song is the catchiest or the one that sells the most copies. They're editing songs in a way that make them seem more consumable, I guess. I'm trying to edit them in a way that makes them more honest.

As Stephen King says, "No one gets it right the first time." We all edit, we all revise—what's the saying in the military? "Embrace the suck.

You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences. If they come into your head, write them, but then break them down. Do not be afraid to repeat the subject twice, and stay away from too many pronouns and subordinate clauses.

Begin new paragraphs often. Do so when logically necessary, and when the pace of the text requires it, but the more you do it, the better. Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft.

With the passage of time, people's memories always edited the past. A lot of details slipped from their grasp, while others that had seemed trivial at the time took on greater weight.

We should call on the Creator to show more modesty. He created the world in a frenzy of excitement. Instead of revising his rough drafts, he had his work printed straightaway. What a lot of contradictions there are in it. What a log of typing errors, inconsistencies in the plot, passages that are too long and wordy, characters that are entirely superfluous. But it is painful and difficult to cut and trim the living cloth of a book written and published in too much of a hurry

So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten.

Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors.