Just 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

That's the only way to do it. Just like an actor. You can get a great performance if you do a bunch of takes and edit it. You find the moments and string them together. — Lindsey Buckingham

I learned very quickly that if you just go out and make something and maybe fail at it or you just learn how to edit it yourself. I edited my last films. You just do it yourself. You feel so creatively empowered and you're controlling your own destiny as artists. — Daryl Wein

I think a lot of people think it's easy to just post stuff. They think it's the easy way to fame nowadays, but it's been hard. You have to film the video, which takes forever because I'm super picky about all my takes and stuff. Then you have to edit it and upload it, and doing that three times a week is very, very difficult. — Jacob Whitesides

I think directing yourself is a monumental task. Just to self edit as an actor, you work for some directors who don't give you a lot of feedback so you have to do that. That's a difficult thing to do as an actor. — Ashton Kutcher

I love to simplify and edit the contents of just about anything, but women's closets hold particular appeal to me. I edit mine about four times a year and hold a yearly 'clothing swap' to encourage my girlfriends to do the same. — Autumn Reeser

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. — Walter Murch

There are people who just collect a bunch of footage and then edit it later. You definitely feel more protected when a director is moving on when you've actually felt something happen and you know they're watching intently. — Matt Damon

The Just and the unJust inhabiting the same body, so close you can't pry us apart, but we are not friends. He speaks, I edit. He plays, I work. He is famously convivial, I am a recluse. And at the end of the evening, when I'm exhausted and yearning for bed, knowing there's an assignment to complete, he stays on, anything to keep me in the closet a little longer. And when the inevitable question comes, he answers it with aplomb, holding his glass -

Don't mind if I do. — Ward Just

I don't type on the computer or edit. Law students who went to law school really just a couple years after I did were brought up all on the computers and that's how they do it, but I was still part of the older school. — John Roberts

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

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice. — Steve Martin

A curse of being a writer is the compulsion to edit. Take the sign on my walking trail, for example. It reads, 'Watered by well water.' One of these days, no matter how hard I try to resist, I just know I'm going to paint it out to read, 'Irrigated by well water.' If you don't get this, it's because you're not a writer. — Ron Brackin

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (part two), The Guardian, 20 February 2010] — Will Self

I always see the filming as basically going to the grocery store and buying a bunch of ingredients and that's about as far from having a dinner as you can possibly be. Then editing is the cooking, the preparation of the meal and if you don't edit it you've just got a pile of raw meat. — Casey Neistat

I'm not one of those directors who can just kind of walk away from the edit room and come back and check in. — Lynn Shelton

Our film [Hide and seek ]was created as part of the Asian American Film Lab's 11th 72 Hour Film Shootout filmmaking competition, where filmmaking teams have just 72 hours to conceive, write, shoot, edit and submit a film based on a common theme. The winners were announced during the 38th Asian American International Film Festival in New York last July. The theme for 2015 was 'Two Faces' and was part of a larger more general theme of 'Beauty'. — Garth Kravits

I realized in the early days I just didn't edit at all. But I think you become a little more cagey with your lyrics when you know more people are going to hear them and make assumptions about you as a person. Realizing that, you want to be a little more opaque. — Eddie Vedder

The thing with TV and filming is the timing is all faked anyway. You do it so many times, from so many different angles. You never really do it all in one go anyway, so they just fix it all in the edit. — Simon Bird

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

No one leaves the edit room thinking, 'Yeah, I nailed that one!' Everyone I know goes into their first premiere or their first screening thinking, 'I screwed up so bad. I'm sorry, I messed up.' It's just a real common feeling. — Mike Mills

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little. — Ed Helms

If you give the same 200 frames to 200 different people, they'll all probably pick a different frame. The key is editing. Be intuitive enough to be shooting at the right moment, and when you're seeing the action happening just as you want it, shoot. And in the edit you have to go with your gut. — Russell James

They put me in an office with the TV set up and said "Here's the tape. When you're finished writing your copy for the little trailer you're going to do, you'll come out and show it to us and we set you up to go edit it." I turned it on and it was just this hardcore film and I was like, "Oh my God, I've fallen down the rabbit hole." — Julie Davis

Performance is made in the editing room, and I've come to see the truth in that - the idea that they say performances are usually made in the editing room because what you film is the raw material. I think just going through the process of saying, "Which take do we use? Why is that the take we want? I want that take can you edit again, I'm not sure that's the one, I think it's this one." And just because you go through that process, I think somehow it's made me sort of more open about the [actor's] possibilities. — Ralph Fiennes

I'm an actor and a writer and a showrunner and I edit my show ... I have a job that three people usually have, and I have it in one person. And the idea that the critic thought that I had this excess of time for which I could go to, like, panels or write essays was just so laughable to me. — Mindy Kaling

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

Sometimes you will need to leap from one end of this paradoxical spectrum to the other in a matter of minutes, and then back again. As I write this book, for instance, I approach each sentence as if the future of humanity depends upon my getting that sentence just right. I care, because I want it to be lovely. Therefore, anything less than a full commitment to that sentence is lazy and dishonorable. But as I edit my sentence - sometimes immediately after writing it - I have to be willing to throw it to the dogs and never look back. (Unless, of course, I decide that I need that sentence again after all, in which case I must dig up its bones, bring it back to life, and once again regard it as sacred.) It matters./It doesn't matter. — Elizabeth Gilbert

When the simple word processors came in, writing became crisper, less dense - just because of the way we could instantly edit on the screen. Now the ability to mash up words and pictures and links and songs and tweets is what matters. I can't imagine what writing will be like in 2154. — Gail Collins

I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself. — Marianne Faithfull

Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body
not too little, not too much, just right. — Sherry Turkle

It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect
a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960) — Jack McClelland

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.

I don't think my playing style has really changed over the years; it's just gotten better. I can hear the improvement in comparing older records and later records. I'm referring to soloing ability, to having a better sound, to knowing chords better, and getting rhythmically stronger. It also has to do with ideas - learning how to edit your ideas and being better able to follow ideas out to a logical conclusion. — Gary Bartz

Those who want to be serious photographers, you're really going to have to edit your work. You're going to have to understand what you're doing. You're going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do. — Annie Leibovitz

I am inspired just by the way a scene can be interpreted by the actors. It can make a huge difference on the type of music that you write. It's best for me if I don't work at all on a project until the movie is shot and I have some sort of edit in front of me. — Marco Beltrami

Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose. — John Dufresne

I wouldn't ever do a radio edit because I feel like it would totally go against the point of 'Follow Your Arrow.' I just think you're going to like it or not like it. — Kacey Musgraves

In TV, you have no time and sort of just carpet bomb the scene with as many angles as possible as quickly as possible and find it in the edit. — Cary Fukunaga

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

I never edit the songs that come out. And they tend to come out as a whole. The closest thing I have ever done to editing them is just cutting out a verse, but never rewriting lyrics. — Laura Marling

I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us. — Buffy Andrews

Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun. — Heather Grace Stewart

I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves. Then you can edit or mess around with what they've come up with. But you have to allow the artist that space. — Danger Mouse

Writing a song is almost like cheating-writing because you don't have to finish your sentences, you don't have to use any punctuation, no one's going to edit your work. It's so wide open. People just grunt and that's a song. You can kind of do anything. — Mirah

Girls are the White Album and they all have Revolution 9's. They have all that stuff you wish you could edit out.
When you fall in love with a girl, she's the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don't understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she's the bloody Beatles White Album and there's only one of her. — Rob Sheffield

When I play myself, I want to be a slightly better person. It just agrees. Everything I play about myself is kind of true, but it's amplified. We all edit, don't we? If you're self-aware, you stop yourself - you know how to behave properly. — Steve Coogan

I like to shoot scenes where I can see the beginning, middle and end of the entire scene. But, when you edit a movie together, you can just cut right into the middle. You don't need to see them walk into the room and put their jacket on the chair. There's always a lot of shoe leather that you can remove. — Judd Apatow

I'm from Boston, and I get easily overwhelmed in New York, so I go to Boston and stay with my parents for a few months at a time to write, or edit, or just to cry. — Alex Karpovsky

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

In film or TV work, you can have this amazingly dramatic pause, and they'll just edit it out. — Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

When you work on something in an edit room with just a couple of other people, you never know how it is going to be received. — Marshall Curry

How do text messages make you feel existential?
I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking that no one in the world is who they say the are, then my mind goes to how I also edit myself, not just online but in real life, except for those rare instances like right now where I'm ranting- even though that's a lie because I've had this train of thought before and damned if I didn't tweak it in my head a few times to make it sound better- and then my mind starts racing so furiously I can't control my thoughts, and I start thinking about robots and wondering if I'm even a real person. — Adi Alsaid

I really have to edit myself - I need someone with a censor button around me all the time. I'm just a little unaware of what's deemed appropriate. — Andy Dick

When I was about 19, I shot a tape of me doing magic just to people on the streets, and I would edit together all the reactions and I kept pushing this idea, and then ABC came on board and made my first show. — David Blaine

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

If you think of memory not just as looking back but as being aware of time and how it passes and what the passage of it feels like, then there is something about being in motion that does cause it. Through some sleight of mind, physical forward motion makes time seem visible. Which causes me to think that maybe the unnatural speed of cars and jets actually creates nostalgia. Because the simplest way to block out the strangeness of time passing before your eyes is to fix it in place, to edit it down to monuments or potted plants. Like, — Adam Haslett

We've done things that are faster at times, but it's definitely different when we direct all the episodes because it's like we have to write them all, then shoot them all, then edit them all. So we have to just get ahead on those scripts basically. — Mark Duplass

[Writing] is edit, edit, edit. It's almost like getting a boat ready to go to sea. You've still got a countless number of things left to fix, but you've just got to go, "O.K., everybody get on the boat. We're going, ready or not." — Jimmy Buffett

The irony is that I use computers every day of my life to do music because I edit all of my music in a computer. But when it comes to doing live processing, I prefer, as a performer with an instrument, not just having the computer as the only thing I have. I really prefer and find it much more flexible to have the limitations of pedals. — Zeena Parkins

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don't make it. So I tried to make it more refined. I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn't want to say or didn't want to show or I was not able to find how to show. — Agnes Varda

With an independent movie, it's like, 'Okay I know what I want, and I got to go for it.' I just got to get the A version of this. Occasionally we'll try a B version, but not often. We'll just get what's scripted and try to do that as best we can, so you sort of edit while you shoot an independent movie. — David Twohy