#editing

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. ↗

— Ben Shahn

#confess #dictatorial #doing #editing #his

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

— Oliver Stone

#because #being #cut #distinctive #editing

They make Spy Kids, they make Scream, they make A Scary Movie. This doesn't do that, so it could be a very bad marriage. I'm trying to keep this potential nightmare quiet because we're just finishing editing. ↗

— Terry Gilliam

#because #could #editing #finishing #i

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#editing #editing-humor #editors #joy #neurosis

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress... Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! ↗

— Nick Hornby

#humor #work #writing #humor

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing. ↗

— Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#editing #personal-growth #poetry #writing #change

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#conflation #editing #exaggeration #francis-bacon #shakespeare