Quotes About Editing

I think that's all you do as an actor. You give ingredients for the edit, and the edit's the stew, and they try to make a meal out of it. That's all you are. You just throw things in. This is an idea, this is an idea.

You have a schedule that you really have to stick to with TV and make sure that you are producing enough film for the network to edit through and air quickly.

One of my biggest fears as a director is that everything is taking too long on camera. The actor saying their lines, the silence between lines, the length of time it takes to walk from A to B. So you try it at different speeds and then see what sticks in the edit room.

We stitch together our days and edit out our nights.

So, while I gave up the notions of publishing at that time, I never stopped editing and refining that book. A few years later, in 1987, I thought I had it ready to go out again.

I've pretty much stopped using a laptop because I'm not line-editing a lot of things anymore.

In late 1999, I was walking down Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks with my late producing partner Sharyn Lane after a day of editing 'Sordid Lives.' We passed the Psychic Book Store and decided to go in and get a reading. We weren't believers, but what the hell? We needed a sign.

I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.

If I can be dead honest with you, when I first see the script for a new episode of 'Endeavour,' if anything jars, I say, 'What's this? Has it got a place in our story?' And if it hasn't, it has to go.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

I'm not a good storyteller. I always think I'm going to get interrupted, or something's going to get edited. I think that comes from being in a large family, so you have to get your story in really quick or someone cuts you off.

I think 'GoodFellas' is just a perfect film. From an efficiency of storytelling standpoint, from an entertainment standpoint, from a performance standpoint, from a use of music standpoint, from a cinematography and editing standpoint - to me, it's just a perfect movie.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

Draft ugly and edit pretty.

If you hit two crappy pages, even if you never use them, you can feel "successful" for the day. Sometimes you barely eke out two pages, and they are truly terrible. But at least 50% of the time, you'll produce perhaps 5, 10, or even—on the rare miracle day—20 pages. Draft ugly and edit pretty.

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.

I cross things out more than I write them. And if I try to sing a line, and I know that it's written incorrectly, I get this weird sort of physical nausea, and my mouth curls up all strange. I guess that's why I always write the words first: because, if everything feels okay, I'm ready to put it to music.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

You are sure that I would not be well advised to make certain excisions and eliminations? You do not think it would be a good thing to cut, to prune? I might, for example, delete the rather exhaustive excursus into the family life of the early Assyrians?

By carefully editing what I thought would harm her, I turned my childhood into something as glamorous as forbidden fruit.

When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, Is this necessary at this point in the book?