Quotes About Editing

Be wary of cutting and pasting research nuggets directly into your manuscript.

It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy. The emotions seem to operate with an all-or-nothing switch.

I've worked on a set before, know something about cameras, and done some editing.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.

I censor myself all the time.

I had worked for a lot of directors whose work I didn't respect, and as I was editing material, I was thinking about how I would have shot the scenes and what I would have done to make the scenes better. After several years of that, I got to the point that I was pretty confident I could sit in the director's chair.

A lot can change in the editing room.

I feel like the job in editing is to let the movie tell you what it is. So again, it's like sculpture. You just start taking away, you add a nose here, you cut off, like, the side of the cheek over here in the crease, and you have a face. But it really reveals to you what it means to be over time, and if you have enough time.

I have more control of the material if I produce. I can be much more active in choosing the writer, shaping the script, casting and editing the film.

I want to challenge my cinematography and my editing.

A film ingeniously directed does indeed give the impression of having been laid end to end, but a film ingeniously edited gives the impression of having suppressed all direction.

Ben Rome was a perfectionist. He checked every letter that went out to make sure the English was correct.

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

I believe every editor should stand to edit. That's just my particular soapbox. Some things are so delicate and depend on such fine, delicate work. One frame in one direction or another can make such a difference and it is, in that, like brain surgery.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

I'm always coming back with too much footage. Most filmmakers do, but I'm always surprised that it keeps happening to me.

One of the things I learned in editing 'The Reagan Diaries' is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.

I decided to do advertising, as ad films were made in only 10 days, and started assisting Sanjeev Sharma and Mansoor Khan. Surprisingly, I was a whiz kid and soon learnt to edit films and became an expert at it.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Preoccupation with style will not produce it. No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes. It is a product of the quality of his emotion and perception; it is the ability to transfer these to paper which makes him a writer, in contrast to the great number of people who have just as good emotions and just as keen perceptions, but cannot come within a googol of miles of putting them on paper.

For twenty years I have sat alone at a desk tinkering with sentences and then sending them out, and for most of my literary life the difference between throwing something in the trash and publishing it was imperceptible...

Writing, as we are taught to do it, becomes an antihuman activity. We are forever editing, leaving out the details that might not be pertinent. We are trained to self-doubt, to self-scrutiny in the place of self-expression.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

We writers have this saying 'Kill your darlings'... but I suppose you family men don't agree with it.