Editing quotes:

Send

My life needs editing. -- Mort Sahl
Editing is kind of a solitary job. -- Joe Dante
Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification. -- Robert Gottlieb
Editing and post-production is so important with comedy. -- Eddie Kaye Thomas
Editing is the most companionable form of education. -- Ed Weeks
Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. -- Esther Freud
Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly. -- Harold Ross
Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib. -- Quincy Jones
Writing is like shadow boxing. Editing is when the shadows fight back. -- Adam Copeland
--
Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process. -- Sydney Pollack
Editing and selectivity are processes that provide the first steps in determining and conveying content. -- Gerald Brommer
I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing - it's always about gut. -- Graydon Carter
Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love. -- stephanie roberts
Editing is the very edge of your knowledge forced to grow--a test you can't cheat on. -- S. Kelley Harrell
Editing is a very tough period. You're confronted with yourself. It's a deep, dark, truthful mirror. -- Thomas Bidegain
Editing is not a part of the filmmaking process I've ever been privy to as an actress. -- Vera Farmiga
Editing might be a bloody trade. But knives aren't the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too. -- Blake Morrison
Editing is like pruning the rose bush you thought was so perfect and beautiful until it overgrew the garden. -- Larry Enright
Editing is like walking across a room strewn with rose petals and thorns. When you can walk across mostly unbloodied, you're finished. -- Richard Due
Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing -- Garry Marshall
Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing. -- Garry Marshall
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. -- Joe Dante
Editing is not merely a method of the junction of separate scenes or pieces, but is a method that controls the 'psychological guidance' of the spectator. -- Vsevolod Pudovkin
Editing a film is always a question of time, and the director. I've worked with a lot of directors who don't mind my involvement. They appreciated it. -- Richard Gere
Editing is a natural extension of collage making. It's actually one of the few areas that women were able to excel in in the film industry from the beginning. -- Rachel True
Editing was hard for me. It was hard to be in a room by yourself and not have that collaborative spirit. Comedies are really tight and timing is everything. -- Jerusha Hess
Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix. -- Lorrie Moore
Editing is a natural extension of the collage making. It's actually one of the few areas that women were able to excel in in the film industry from the beginning. -- Rachel True
Editing is very satisfying process. You spend hours working on something and then you get to watch it. It's immediately satisfying where everything else is just kind of waiting and waiting and waiting. -- Shane Carruth
I think I'm succinct to the point of trying to write the two-word novel. Editing my work almost never means taking anything out but rather adding, because I'm always stripping down. I tend to under-write rather than over-write. -- Kate DiCamillo
I've directed bits of action and so I know that it's long and it's very detailed. Editing action is a good deal more exciting than shooting action. Shooting action is very, very meticulous, it's increments, tiny little pieces. -- Sam Mendes
I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical. -- Ricky Gervais
Editing is hard but nowhere NEAR as tough as facing that blank page and blinking cursor each day. You're all alone and no one else can do it. At least with editing you have someone in the trench with you. -- Sarah Dessen
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too. -- Brian Eno
Sound and Visual Effects and Editing are sometimes referred to as technical awards. They're not technical awards. They're given for artistic decisions. And sometimes we make them better than others, and I guess we made a couple of good ones on this one. -- Randy Thom
Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit. -- Vera Farmiga
I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn't at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process. -- Steven Soderbergh
Editing can alter the original meaning and context, and computers can alter the image itself. The camera can also be manipulated. At the very least, it must be turned in one direction - only one direction at a time ... Who chooses what direction to point the camera, and why? -- Dan Rather
What I don't have in theater is editing. -- Julie Taymor
I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy. -- Ernest Hemingway
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers. -- T. S. Eliot
I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing. -- Marilyn Hacker
I directed a movie and now, I'm going to do the editing. -- Salma Hayek
Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor. -- James Franco
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space. -- Orson Scott Card
I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in. -- Sarah Vowell
The films dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing. -- Edward Dmytryk
There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation. -- David Antin
That's the thing about making a movie: You never finish editing. They just take it away from you. -- Abel Ferrara
There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. -- Fred Rodell
All you're trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room. -- Martin Short
I have an adult emotional life and an editing system inside me which prevents me from being preposterously stupid. -- Stephen Hopkins
If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object. -- Colin Greenwood
So much can be learned by any filmmaker by studying his work, in terms of blocking, staging, editing and sound. -- Ramin Bahrani
I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting. -- Werner Herzog
Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art. -- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Reality TV finds talented people. There are no scripts. The editing is what it's all about. Great editing makes those shows. -- Pete Waterman
If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing. -- William Safire
I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing. -- Alexander Payne
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room. -- Walter Murch
A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor. -- Sofia Coppola
If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked. -- Bill Walsh
I'm a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it's a process I've been doing since I was younger. -- Lana Del Rey
Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting -- Satyajit Ray
And after you've done the acting, there's a lot of places you can put your input - in the editing, in the production of it, in the rewriting of it and so on -- Paul Reiser
My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight. -- Maya Lin
I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command. -- Lynn Abbey
With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories. -- Lucy Walker
There's editing, and scripts to read and edit, and casting, and all the elements of production that just sort of take up the normal downtime that you would have as an actor. So there's not a lot of that for me. -- Richard Dean Anderson
When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water. -- Ridley Scott
You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice. -- Frederick Wiseman
I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them. -- Spike Jonze
In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely. -- Michael Arndt
I don't come from a film background. I haven't learned anything about films or film-making. But I have a thirst to know everything about my profession. I want to learn about cinematography, about editing, about music recordings, about post-production. So when people in the know talk, I willingly listen. -- Priyanka Chopra
I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing. -- Karen Thompson Walker
I put myself in the place of the listener when editing my writing. The last thing that I want to do is be preached at and told who to be or what to think when listening to an artist. However, I do want to be inspired. There's a fine line. -- Macklemore
There is anxiety, but it comes after you've finished filming because it's out of your hands; people are editing it, they're cutting it, marketing it. And it's... part your career sort of rides on that. But when you're actually filming it's a team thing and it really feels good there for me. -- Hugh Jackman
If you're not prepared, and you're not passionate, and you don't push yourself to a level of human exhaustion on every level, mentally and physically and creatively... I've seen directors who approach it casually, and they do somehow maintain better hours... but I could never be that guy. I am up and editing all night. -- Drew Barrymore
Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing. -- Ice Cube
Children used to get bullied at school. Now they go home, and that's where the problem starts - because they sit on their phones all night, thinking about who's 'liked' a photo of them, who hates them, who loves them. They don't know what's real and what's not, editing their lives constantly to fit other people's views. -- Jessie J
The film is made in the editing room. The shooting of the film is about shopping, almost. It's like going to get all the ingredients together, and you've got to make sure before you leave the store that you got all the ingredients. And then you take those ingredients and you can make a good cake - or not. -- Philip Seymour Hoffman
I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing. -- Steve Martin
If I can have the opportunity to go into an editing room, it's like the golden ticket for me. All I want is to learn about everything else in the filmmaking process. I just directed a music video which just came out and that'd sort of be the area of the field that I'm going to move into, I hope. -- Nikki Reed
I no longer do a film for the wrong reasons. I have to be convinced ethically and morally. Both the director and I have to be on the same page. There are just five songs in most films these days, and they have to be amazing. There has to be a twist in the screenplay. The editing has to be crisp. Your hard work should show, but effortlessly. -- Salman Khan
manuscriptmeanuscriptmoanuscriptmanurescriptand so on -- Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode. -- Don Roff
There should be no crying in copyediting. -- Carol Fisher Saller
You should edit before and after editing. -- Dwayne Fry
Length is weight in fiction, pretty much. -- Joan Silber
Verbose is not a synonym for literary. -- Constance Hale
Don't all Air Pirates know how to fry? -- Jack Lewis Baillot
There is no great writing, only great rewriting. -- Louis D. Brandeis
Edit your author as you would be edited. -- Barbara Sjoholm
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. -- Richard Bach
A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses. -- S. Kelley Harrell
Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer. -- Verlyn Klinkenborg
Being discouraged is natural but giving up is not an option. -- Court Young
In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft -- Susi Moore
In writing, there is art. And in art, there is craft -- Susi Moore
Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma -- R.D. Ronald
If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it? -- S. Kelley Harrell
One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words. -- Alessandra Torre
I have a real problem with bloat -- I write like fat ladies diet. -- Stephen King
I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me. -- Jeanne Voelker
It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak. -- Betsy Lerner
Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor. -- Ryan Lilly
A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate. -- Joan Silber
What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark? -- E.A. Bucchianeri
Most of these editors, as they call themselves, couldn't even effectively edit a haiku. -- Frank Black
Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, build on to that which is already excellent. -- Auliq Ice
For most people, I edit. Most people are definitely getting along on the Cliffs Notes. -- Suzanne Finnamore
Slowed time is -- or should be -- a way of pointing to what's important. -- Joan Silber
Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Market it with the persistence of a drug peddler. -- Ashwin Sanghi
Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar. -- Red Red Rover
If you can listen to or read anything, but misspelled words offend you, raise your hadn. -- Jarod Kintz
Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works -- Munia Khan
I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival. -- Jack McClelland
Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome. -- Christopher Hitchens
[I]n the long run it's worthwhile to see the manuscript as a text capable of improvement. -- Barbara Sjoholm

Send