Good Edit Quotes & Sayings

We're not very good as a species at looking into the future. It's much easier to look back at the past. We can edit out the bits we don't like, reinvent ourselves. But there's nothing about the future we can edit or reinvent. Most people are prisoners of the future just as much as they are prisoners of their genes. — Peter James

The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad. — Jeff Tweedy

Writin songs is like a mystery. The most difficult thing to do is have a good idea. If you have a decent idea, the songs are the easy part. Actually having something to say is the hard part. If you get an idea for a song, then it pulls you along. There are just some ideas that you get that are really hard to edit out; it's hard to stop thinking about some bad ideas. So you just finish it and you end up putting it on a record. — Lyle Lovett

you get a good story about three times a year. It comes in the shower on a day you have time. Couple hours to crank out, couple more to edit and there you have it. But you aren't responsible. It's from some antenna you put out and it happens to pick up a signal. Ideas sit for years before the way to crack them hits you. You can't force it. All you can do is try not to fuck it up. Stay out of its way. Don't slack off and erase your mind reading about rape on Twitter. — Delicious Tacos

Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground - you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it's going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move. — Anne Lamott

You see, I had decided - rightly or wrongly - to grow a moustache, and this had cut Jeeves to the quick. He couldn't stick the thing at any price, and I had been living ever since in an atmosphere of bally disapproval till I was getting jolly well fed up with it. What I mean is, while there's no doubt that in certain matters of dress Jeeves's judgment is absolutely sound and should be followed, it seemed to me that it was getting a bit too thick if he was going to edit my face as well as my costume. No one can call me an unreasonable chappie, and many's the time I've given in like a lamb when Jeeves has voted against one of my pet suits or ties; but when it comes to a valet's staking out a claim on your upper lip you've simply got to have a bit of the good old bulldog pluck and defy the blighter. — P.G. Wodehouse

That's the purpose of creative stuff: when you really love what you do, you have to know at some point, or points, you're not going to be good at it. That's just the process of learning. I can edit it and try to be as perfect as I can, but I'm still going to have my vulnerable spots and my weaknesses. — Albert Hammond Jr.

To The Critics

Suicide has made more than one mediocre author glorious before he's able to achieve that sobering "second edition" making his a suicide that waits until it's justified. But I've taken more precautions against to Suicide which is to survive in the face of failure. Success is mostly editing, that's what makes things nice. To edit is the other great Power; thus this novel started at age 30, continued at 50 and its 73, has finally achieve supremacy: a person of Good Taste as the third author and as a result the editor of all three. In the end I'll be the author of a letter to the critics a sort of "open letter" but for the living: suicide is not something you can edit out. — Macedonio Fernandez

So the fundamental question before the church is who is Lord? Is the church the lord of Jesus Christ, so that it has liberty to edit and manipulate, accepting what it likes and rejecting what it dislikes? Or is Jesus Christ our Teacher and our Lord, so that we believe and obey his teaching? He still says to us, 'Why do you call me, "Lord, Lord," and do not do what I say?' (Luke 6:46). To confess Jesus as Lord but not obey him is to build our lives on a foundation of sand. Again, 'Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me,' he said in the upper room (John 14:21). Here then are two cultures and two value systems, two standards and two lifestyles. On the one side there is the fashion of the world around us; on the other side is the revealed, good and pleasing will of God. Radical disciples have little difficulty in making their choice. — John R.W. Stott

What good is making a jewel if nobody see it? But cost depends on the story. To get those performances in 'Biutiful,' you need that time. You need 60 takes in a scene and a year to edit. It's not realistic to do it any other way. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I like to skip prewriting. I love just jumping into the actual writing process. Then I revise/edit and fix what I need to. Then the following steps; proofread and publish. Of course before you just go into writing, it would be a good idea to do some charts of each chapter ... what you would want each one to be about and have a character list with their personalities and how they will come into play in your book. I mean, you wouldn't just want to go all crazy and jot down all kinds of random stuff at once ... trust me, you'll go crazy. With writing, you take it as it comes, go with your own flow.-Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

The tension was so thick in the room, it was too much. He was too much. I couldn't take the pressure, so I panicked. Sexy and in control Grace left and twelve-year-old Grace took her place. "Heh, heh, you said nuts," I burst out. My self-edit button was now turned off for good. — Alice Clayton

So it is written - but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over 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. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again. — Catherynne M Valente

I write in complete silence using only two fingers so I can't type faster than I edit at the same time, saving me from having to go back. Although it does create a lot of capitalization issues. And punctuation problems. I didn't say it was a good routine. — Dan Alatorre

The question is not whether a picture is good, in some formal, technical sense, but, does it mean what I need it to mean? Writers can edit sentences that may be well-crafted but that don't express an intended thought. But in photography, there are no revisions: A photograph is in or it's out, and the photographer must live with the consequences of his or her choices. — Thomas Roma

I do like a song that can look good on a page without even being sung. I edit and edit and edit. — Jakob Dylan

It was trying to make my tennis game look mildly respectable, which I found you don't even really need to practice if you have a really good editor. They can edit it and you're like, "Hey, it looks like I'm playing really well." That was the fun part, but it was like going to summer camp. — Paul Reiser

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it. — Chuck Klosterman

The 1992 US Olympic basketball team is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: 'OK, Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He'll do the interior monologue. Hemingway will edit - no, don't make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He's young, but he's got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can't play - they're girls.' — Anna Quindlen

Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire. — Lisa Scottoline

I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog. — Fran Lebowitz

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it. — Anita Shreve

A good edit process turns rocks into diamonds, and every author should love that part as much as the creative phase. I do love it. It's a different side to writing. It's like the fine-tuning. — Kim Smith

Josh [Gad] is such an amazing improviser and is so good when the material is flowing from him that sometimes, if a written scene isn't working quite right, I'll tell him that we've got it and that he can just play. He'll blow us away with some super weird stuff and some wild things that we might use bits and pieces of in the edit, and then I'll say, "Just for good measure, let's do one more of the scripted version." — Josh Gad

Fine. I don't have the time or the inclination to edit erotica, even good erotica, if there is such an animal. I'm not the only editor here. Give it to Thomas Finley." Zach named his least favorite coworker, the one who'd given him his nickname. "Or Angie Clark even."

"Finley? That pansy? He'd make a pass at Sutherlin, and she'd eat him alive. If you punched him in the face, he wouldn't even know how to bleed right."

Zach nearly laughed in agreement before remembering he was fighting with J.P. — Tiffany Reisz

A small town called Phoenixville in Pennsylvania is invaded by aliens. Or maybe alien singular, it's hard to tell. Because this hostile visitor is an amorphous mass of goo that must be jelly 'cos jam don't shake like that. It doesn't do too much leaping (unless you count the jerk-edit special effects), but it's very good at sliding across the floor, killing puny humans by absorbing them. Steve McQueen is Steve is the boy who leads a group of teens who foil its evil plan to turn Earth into a giant trifle. — Garry Mulholland

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. — Gregory Bateson