Self Editing Quotes & Sayings

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. — Betsy Lerner

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread. — Noah Lukeman

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. — Brit Marling

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. — Jonathan Galassi

Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey have been successful in their self-publishing ventures. But notice that Hocking would prefer to write and hand over the editing, promotion, and selling to a traditional publisher. — Ellen Datlow

The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes. — Judith Thurman

Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs. — Steven Pinker

Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak. — Henry Adams

One of the biggest differences between you and a traditionally published author is that a self-pubbed author is responsible for everything. Not just writing the book - but cover design, editing, producing, distribution, and publicity as well. — M.J. Rose

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship. — George Wald

Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. — James Tate

When you're writing is when the "god should I just drop this" feeling can hit. When you're editing is when the "god this is awful and I've wasted everyone's time and money and will be revealed as a fraud" feeling can hit. — Rian Johnson

When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work. — Chris Pratt

My self-editing process is intense. — George Murray

I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head. — Neil Gaiman

A 3K word story might well be done in some caffeine-and-nicotine-fuelled 36 hour session, and at the end of it, there'll be a few passes of editing required, but I basically have a polished draft. — Hal Duncan

Why does a little girl lose her emotional equilibrium in a moment of parental discipline, or a megastar musician forget who she is because of one criticism? Or why, when a text message or the subject line of an e-mail says, "We need to talk" (or for us pastors, "About your sermon") are we struck with a sudden feeling of doom? Why do we spend hours in the gym or in front of the mirror or online meticulously editing our social media profiles? Why is the perfect "selfie" such a large part of how we present ourselves to the world? Why do we live in constant disequilibrium about what our real or imagined critics might say about us? — Scott Sauls

Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving. — Neel Burton

Self publishing' is not as easy as it is portrayed! When you think you have finished your book, proof read, proof read again, and again, and again. Don't believe it is ready until you have a hard copy proofed! — Phil Simpkin

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9. — Dennis Ritchie

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Some artists, such as Jack Kirby, need no plot at all. I mean I'll just say to Jack, "Let's let the next villain be Dr. Doom" ... or I may not even say that. He may tell me. And then he goes home and does it. He's so good at plots, I'm sure he's a thousand times better than I. He just makes up the plots for these stories. All I do is a little editing ... I may tell him that he's gone too far in one direction or another. Of course, occasionally I'll give him a plot, but we're practically both the writers on the things. — Stan Lee

Bobby is really the one who did all the editing on that stuff. And he did all the mixing. I particularly like the record we did with Logic because Scott Harding did a great job mixing it. He's really a killing engineer. — Charlie Hunter

I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival. — Jack McClelland

I've puzzled over the difficulty that students have with editing, and I think I've identified its source: It's their self-talk. We all talk to ourselves, inside our heads. That's what consciousness is. — Richard Rhodes

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

Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode. — Don Roff

When you're editing the film, you use a temp track. So you're putting music in there for a rough cut to keep track of what's going on. It can be a hindrance if wrong, it can be an enormous asset if you get it right. — Nicholas Jarecki

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis's comments on them, and burned them. — A.S. Byatt

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

Here's one way that we try to actively and immediately bring in kindness in our meetings and camps: we ask our girls to stop before they speak and reevaluate what they're going to say based on this acronym:


True
Honest
Important
Necessary
Kind


Is what they're out to say True? Is it Honest? Is it Important? Necessary Kind?
We ask the to T.H.I.N.K. before they speak text, or type, and try to incorporate it into their daily lives -- especially within their interactions with their friends and classmates -- as much as possible. It's a choice girls can make: Do they want to encourage others with their words, or bring others down?

You might think this won't resonate with your middle school girl, but I promise that it works. It's not about self-editing or asking her not to speak her truth, of course; it's about thinking of others too. — Haley Kilpatrick

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma ... — R.D. Ronald

Writing is all about self-editing; it's all about being present being aware of what's happening — Joan Armatrading

What you write on the page has nothing to do with when you're on set. When you're on set, it has nothing to do with when you're in the editing room. And when you're in the editing room, it has nothing to do with the final movie. You just have to let it go. — Lori Petty

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
(Casual Chance, 1964) — Colette

I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film. — Julie Delpy

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing. — Sarah Dessen

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught - prayer, fasting and self-mutilation. — Donald Barthelme

In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices. — Don DeLillo

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don't exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, 'retouching artists' conspire to 'help' beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman's 60 year old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they're comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine. — Dalma Heyn

I enjoy twitter accounts that are meticulously edited just as much as I enjoy twitter accounts that aren't edited at all, but it can feel kind of disappointing to me when I see that someone is editing their tweets out of self-consciousness. — Mira Gonzalez

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

How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one's partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, just as a cathartic exercise? What important piece of her brain was missing that deprived her of such, well, deeply necessary acts of physical editing? — Ben Marcus

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting. — Nick Cave

I functioned as a movement theologian, continuously shifting from movement to movement toward whatever new idea i thought might seem to be an acceptable modernization of Christianity. This required me to be constantly on the move, networking, editing, writing, strategizing and serving as an information adviser for student movement leaders. This was admittedly a massive departure from classic Christianity, which I recognize but ignored. If theology require reasoning out of God's self-disclosure, I was certainly not doing that
rather the opposite. — Thomas C. Oden

I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it. — Barack Obama

I can hire out for editing, proofreading, formatting, and cover design, and those are fixed, sunk costs. Once those are paid, I can earn 70% on a self-pubbed ebook. — J.A. Konrath

Editing one's writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle. — Fennel Hudson

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?' — James Thurber

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. — Clay Shirky

The editing of a good piece of writing is like the editing of one's life: never quite complete; rendering all, ultimately, unfinished works when we perish from this earth. — K.C. Woodworth

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

I am the discoverer of Quantum Editing, the process whereby the amateur editor keeps being changed by the editing he does, requiring him to further edit the manuscript, changing him yet further, etc. — Matt Chatelain

One of the first decisions I made, as the director of "Hide and Seek," was that our film would be silent and use underscoring of original music that I was planning on composing. The decision was mostly predicated on knowing how time consuming the editing of dialogue can be and given the various locations we shot in, I didn't want to worry about having to mix room tones in such a short amount of time. — Garth Kravits

I like to do the camera work myself because I kind of feel it, you know, I don't articulate it, I feel it. It's the same with editing. — Nina Menkes

When you make a 3-D movie you actually have to plan the way the visuals look because there's a parallax issue, and there's an issue of editing; you can't edit very quickly in 3-D because the eye won't adjust fast enough for it. — Joe Dante

Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing. — K.M. Soehnlein

I was a young guy who started as a fact checker," he said, "but I always knew - and was told - that I would get a shot at reporting, writing, and editing. For a young, ambitious, talented woman, that elevator was out of order. — Lynn Povich

I think Gram did his best work in co-writes. Sometimes when you're working with one other person, it's such a magical thing. You're editing each other and you're trying to create that one spark. — Chris Hillman

I don't shoot movies quickly because I get a lot of coverage and a lot of angles, so we have all the pieces in the editing. I do a lot of takes, but it's because I'm looking for something. — Nancy Meyers

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is. — Samuel S. Vaughan

I visited England immediately after I finished writing 'The Marrying Season,' before any editing or revisions. — Candace Camp

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. — Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

The bottom line is that your performance is made in the editing room. — Brent Sexton

On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships. — Walter Kirn

Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side. — Eric T. Benoit

I confess ... if I typo a Facebook post I will edit it. I know it's only Facebook but it's an editing sickness. — Michelle M. Pillow

If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff. — David Benioff

If you treat editing like you're making an abridged version of your book, it can help determine what's vital vs what can be cut. — Kira Hawke

You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing. — Guy Kawasaki

Newspapers and magazines have been valuable to us precisely because they apply filters to information, otherwise known as editing, and often the Internet seems valuable for exactly the opposite reason: You can get your news without a filter. — Michael Specter

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

I feel like my art is very eclectic. I have taken my favorite things - be that costume designing, fashion sense, music and video editing - and I threw them all into one big clump. And that's what I do. — Lindsey Stirling

I spent a fair amount of time editing the lyrics and allowing the song to kind of evolve ... anytime there's anything worthwhile, it certainly 'feels' like it happened on the spur of the moment, but it's a composite of lots of spurs of the moment, hopefully. And over time, you catch up with those, and then you have a full set of lyrics you've thought of and you feel comfortable singing. — Jeff Tweedy

Years working at a newspaper. You learn to write fast and reasonably good and in a manner which does not require substantial editing. Or your editors and copyeditors stab you to death and hang your corpse in the newsroom as a warning to the other staff writers. — John Scalzi

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Edit until your fingers bleed, then take a few deep breaths and edit some more... — Stephen B. Seager

You have to know what you're shooting. Don't just make your movie in the editing room and just get everything you can on the day. — Patrick Wilson

When you're editing, you're putting it together in a way that makes sense metaphysically. You're not inventing it, but you're finding the story that's there. You're making a play that's eventually going to go on stage and present itself to an audience. You want to show what happened, not exactly what you have evidence of happening. — D. A. Pennebaker

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

He presses his forehead down on the podium and I watched his shoulders shake, and then finally, he said, "Goddamn it, Augustus, editing your own eulogy."
"Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus," Gus said. — John Green

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm. — Christos Tsiolkas