Editing Quotations

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.

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

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.

I have an adult emotional life and an editing system inside me which prevents me from being preposterously stupid.

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.

When it comes to the ratings, I don't know what the rating system is. So when it comes to me, I've learned, with the little experience that I have, that when I feel really good about a movie in the editing room, it works. And when I've felt like a movie wasn't working, it didn't work.

Editing is such a voyeuristic treat for me. I land on a theme and ask authors to pen works that fit the topic.

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.

I hate sitting around and waiting; that's why I always have an editing suite on set.

I'm just attracted to the action element of science fiction. It's great to sit in the editing room with the director and sound engineers and to create the feeling where your heart is racing and you're sitting at the edge of your seat and you find yourself holding your breath.

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.

Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing

Editing and post-production is so important with comedy.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

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.

Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

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.

I love directing more than anything in the world, and I love being in the editing room. I love cutting. When I'm shooting, I cut it in my head anyway. That's not to say that it always turns out that way, but you have a sense when you're composing a sequence or a scene how you want it to look anyway.

The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.

All you're trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room.

A harsh reality of newspaper editing is that the deadlines don't allow for the polish that you expect in books or even magazines

I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time.

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

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

I'm not a writer, but I'm very good at editing. That's my specialty. I can read something and tell you everything that's wrong with it and what's great about it and what needs to change, but it's hard for me to organize my thoughts.

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.

Formulating the proposal is about 80% of the actual time of the process. In the end, the time spent filming, editing and postproduction is a very small proportion of the total time you spend in the production of the film.

I feel that working with the camera and editing it is actually my strong suit.

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.

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.

Directing, editing, and everything about filmmaking has definitely changed me as an actor.

Reality TV finds talented people. There are no scripts. The editing is what it's all about. Great editing makes those shows.

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think 'We don't need to be as diligent with the razor blade,' but they do.

I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.

Every time I sit down to write, I need to commit to a word count goal, otherwise I waste too much time editing and re-editing my previous work, staring dreamily off into space, pretending that I'm thinking profound, poetic thoughts when really I'm just thinking, 'Look at me being a writer! I'm so happy I'm a writer!'

If you're working on a computer and you're editing bass, it looks like a warm curvy, sort of feminine object.

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.

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

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Most fledgling and mid-list writers are lucky to be offered a 4-figure sum and are not only expected to deliver copy that needs minimal editing but also take an active part in marketing and publicizing their work.

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.

I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference.

In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth.

I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

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.

This applies to many film jobs, not just editing: half the job is doing the job, and the other half is finding ways to get along with people and tuning yourself in to the delicacy of the situation.

As an actor you have to bring to the table your creative input. But when a director like Ridley Scott says I want you to do this this way, you know when he gets to the editing room he has a reason for it. Its like watching a masterpiece.

I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.

Artistry is important. Skill, hard work, rewriting, editing, and careful, careful craft: All of these are necessary. These are what separate the beginners from experienced artists.

I'm attracted to directors in general because I appreciate the work and the job they have to do. I watched the post-production, I watched the pre-production... post-production is something that I'm very interested in and I did spend a lot of time in editing rooms when I was young pretending to be sick.

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.

I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing - it's always about gut.

I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary.

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.

But I suppose film is distinctive because of its nature, of its being able to cut through time with editing.

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.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

The one place I've seen something really come together is in editing. Sometimes you can save pieces in a way that you're really shocked.

I was the Playmate editor for 'Playboy' for two years. I produced two years' worth of centerfolds. I did everything on that, from picking the girls to designing the sets to picking the wardrobe, coming up with themes, assigning the photographer, down to editing the photos and approving the retouching.

After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.

To me I don't deal with stress well at all, and it is stressful enough for me to deal with my own one character. So if I had to deal with all the characters and the special effects, and the editing and make the writing tweaks and do everything the director does, that would drive me to an early grave, and I just can't do it.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

Our job as friends, mentors, parents, and writing coaches is not to write anyone's college essay. That's cheating. Plus, it sends a discouraging message to the teenager that he or she can't be trusted with this important assignment. Trust the student to write the essay, but verify that it gets done. Gentle editing and proofreading are allowed.

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

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.

I re-mastered 'The Conversation' a few years ago for DVD. 'The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way. Truth be told, I couldn't.

Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them.

I love the idea that the editing room is the final time you write. You should still be creatively solving problems even at that point. It's not really until you're locked that you can call it quits.

Editing is not a part of the filmmaking process I've ever been privy to as an actress.

I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

I'm a student. I want to do better, and I want directors who can find the actress in me and be my teachers. I'm interested in the whole process of editing, post-production and direction.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

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

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

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

When I say 'publishing is the new literacy,' I don't mean there's no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way.

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.

I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.

When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'

For me, shooting, editing, and scoring rely on rhythm.

I confess that Roy was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn't understand at the time.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

Part of the pleasure of editing 'Vogue,' one that lies in a long tradition of this magazine, is being able to feature those who define the culture at any given moment, who stir things up, whose presence in the world shapes the way it looks and influences the way we see it.

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

You never know what you do that could be totally out of left field, which actually might work and give something fresh to the whole scene, to the character, whatever. If you have that with a director who then knows how to shape it, either in the direction, in the moment, or in the editing, then that's good.

From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things.

Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.

Unfortunately, I am very aware of editing and I look at the monitor too much. Sometimes the monitor can become your worst enemy because you can, consciously or unconsciously, start editing yourself.

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

The best moments can't be preconceived. I've spent a lot of time in editing rooms, and a scene can be technically perfect, with perfect delivery and facial expression and timing, and you remember all your lines, and it is dead.

I started as a child, in this PBS series 'Voyage of the Mimi,' which led to driving down to New York for 'Afterschool Special' auditions, which led to moving to Los Angeles. I wanted to be an actor. But in L.A., I got into film technology, and I was building cheap editing systems and would edit my friend's acting reels.

I can't drag myself away from 'Final Cut Pro.' It is a digital video editing system. I am obsessed with it, but I am always away from home, and I can't use it.

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.