Top 100 Edit Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.
Lauren Oliver
#4. There is also an artistic element which is lead by the film maker. Issues of what is reality and objectivity are as always relevant as someone is going to edit the film.
Ben Edwards
#5. You know how everyone - there's this maxim that we all become our mother or we all become our parents. And, generally, I really wouldn't mind becoming my mother. I really like her, so I wouldn't mind becoming her. But I definitely need to edit her.
Sarah Koenig
#6. 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
#7. Once I'm in the editing room, forget about what I intended to shoot. I take a cold, hard look at what I really did shoot, and then I edit that because, if you try to edit what you intended and you missed somewhere, that will show up.
Doug Liman
#8. CRT teaches us: reflect, inhibit, and edit.
Anonymous
#9. Even though I studied in New York and I know the American system, I come from France where I learned that with movies in France where the director is king. There's no such thing as a studio edit. It's the director's cut, period.
Louis Leterrier
#10. One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.
Hunter S. Thompson
#11. I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.
Fran Lebowitz
#12. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
#13. I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that's a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don't know who that person is then you don't really know what's going on with the person being interviewed.
Sheila Heti
#15. I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.
Jimmy Wales
#16. I'm in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that's the movie. They're not discovering the movie in postproduction. They're editing the script they shot.
Spike Jonze
#17. I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us.
Buffy Andrews
#18. One of the things you have to do when you edit your work is make sure that when you use the first person, it's about more than you. We need the story of us.
Barry Lopez
#19. 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
#20. I think most new writers are better off going with traditional publishers who will actually, at a minimum, edit your work, package it well, and market it for you.
Ellen Datlow
#21. I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
Mark Haddon
#22. Write what's in you. Write readily and well. Then edit. Then share or send. Not before.
Rodney Richards
#23. 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
#24. I film quite a bit of footage, then edit. Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can't. My attitude is always 'let it keep rolling.'
Terrence Malick
#25. Write drunk (on emotion); edit sober (on rationality and intention).
Faulkner, reimagined by me.
Christina Cooke
#27. For most people, I edit. Most people are definitely getting along on the Cliffs Notes.
Suzanne Finnamore
#28. There were times, earlier in my career, where I didn't have the wherewithal to self-edit, and I probably said things and pushed the limits to places where people might be put off. But that's truly part of developing as an artist.
Dane Cook
#29. I think this is an exciting time to be a female filmmaker. Trust your instincts, work harder than anyone else and learn your craft. Know it all. This means learn how to shoot, edit, produce and direct. Get as much experience as you can and watch a lot of films.
Alex Hammond
#30. 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
#31. My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.
Maggie Nelson
#32. Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless
Zaha Hadid
#33. THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.
Ken Wilber
#34. I'm homemade. I upload my videos in my living room; I edit everything, and I upload on my laptop. And my viewers love that about me, and they get inspired and do it themselves.
Michelle Phan
#35. Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.
Mitch Kapor
#36. I'm too diplomatic. I tend to edit my mind before I speak - it can be incredibly draining.
Erin O'Connor
#37. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
Alan Rickman
#38. Shouldn't a three-course meal be 90 minutes? Do you know how hard you have to edit your menu to pull that off? Twenty-seven minutes. That's the average meal at Jiro's in Tokyo.
David Chang
#39. Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works
Munia Khan
#40. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Arthur Plotnik
#41. You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.
Caitlin Moran
#42. Whereas in a memory you edit things out and sort of restructure the things to seem a little bit more heroic, or to focus on particular aspects that magnify or reduce certain things.
Chris Ware
#43. Although I use myself in my videos, I really see myself as a character. When I look at myself, when I sit and edit, I never think, "That's me." I think, "This is a character, and how do I edit this to tell a story?"
Laurel Nakadate
#44. It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.
Hilary Mantel
#45. Whenever one has time to write, edit, and delete, there is room for performance.
Sherry Turkle
#46. 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
#47. The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.
Walter Mosley
#48. Love and death are very similar. They're the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit that can change the world you find yourself in.
Michael Marshall Smith
#49. I really like the idea of being utilitarian. My dream is to edit down my wardrobe and be very Japanese, where you have one rolling rack and it's like your four T-shirts, your five dresses, your two pairs of jeans.
Erin Wasson
#50. Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer.
Thomas Perry
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Every film starts with two or three images. Then I try to edit these images.
Leos Carax
#54. Truth hurts, it can't be buried. One moment she goes out...
Deyth Banger
#55. I am such a gearhead. In my recording studio, I personally engineer and edit everything on computers.
Tommy Lee
#56. I know my audience, and they, in turn, know my cinema. When I pick a subject, it's for a family audience. I shoot and edit my films keeping them in mind. I'm dead sure about the product that bears my name.
Rohit Shetty
#57. If you want to create something that's worth doing you have to self-edit from the get-go. You really must be careful and selective with whom you work, you must constantly ask yourself the hard questions about your art, and you must set a nearly unattainable standard for yourself.
John Dyer Baizley
#58. You can shoot and edit a movie from your iPhone and upload it to YouTube. Of course, what's not universal is talent. Are you making anything that anyone really should see?
Adam Leipzig
#59. I don't edit information, I follow it.
David Icke
#60. 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
#61. If I could edit Google Images, then I wouldn't be as scared of the Internet.
Chloe Sevigny
#62. History tells us that America does best when the private sector is energetic and entrepreneurial and the government is attentive and engaged. Who among us, really, would, looking back, wish to edit out either sphere at the entire expense of the other?
Jon Meacham
#63. When you finally start to write something, do not let yourself stop ... even when you are convinced it's the worst garbage ever. This is the biggest caveat for beginning writers. Instead, force yourself to finish what you began, and THEN go back and edit it.
Jodi Picoult
#65. I'm close to my audience. I think I have more tools in my box than other guys who might try it. Also, I know how to do this stuff. I know how to write and shoot and edit. I'm technically adept and that helped with the website. You need a big skill set.
Louis C.K.
#66. Your job as an executive is to edit, not write. It's OK to write once in a while but if you do it often there's a fundamental problem with the team. Every time you do something ask if you're writing or editing and get in the mode of editing.
Jack Dorsey
#67. There's the movie you write, there's the movie you shoot and the movie you edit, and often, you find that you're getting the same information out of a scene that you already have and a scene that's actually more powerful, so you have to make the tough decision to take it out.
Tate Taylor
#68. I don't want to be an editor! I don't want to direct; I'd be a horrible director. I don't want to write - I have a 'story by' credit on one film I did. And I don't want to edit at all.
Topher Grace
#69. With these Funny or Die videos, I do everything for them. I write them, act in them, and co-direct them with my buddy Brian McGinn, who I grew up with. We also edit them together. We're working on a small scale of Internet videos, but we're slowly trying to make them become a bigger thing.
Dave Franco
#70. You can always edit something bad. You can't edit something blank.
Jodi Picoult
#73. Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#74. Well, there are three different processes of making a film, of course. They're sort of re-written three times. You write it to start with, and then you shoot it and you re-write it while shooting and you sort of re-write it as you edit.
Stephen Daldry
#75. TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.
Alan Bradley
#76. Very rarely are we directing or cutting someone elses boards. We concept, direct, shoot, animate and edit almost everything that comes through here.
Ben Nicholson
#77. I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.
Al Yankovic
#78. Everybody hates to edit my film. Back in the day, we called it film - now, my digital cards. But I shoot an awful lot of pictures. I don't want to hesitate, because I believe the moment is everything in a picture. So, I take the pictures.
Carol Guzy
#79. 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
#80. I shoot my big mouth off; it just pops up! I have to learn to edit myself.
Marianne Faithfull
#81. 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.
Frederick Wiseman
#82. I know that many authors say editors don't edit anymore, but that's not been true in my experience.
Victor LaValle
#83. I realize that I am typically vulnerable only when and where and how much it suits me. I can choose my writer words and even go back and edit.
Kristin Armstrong
#84. 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
#85. You don't rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.
V.T. Davy
#86. How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world's problems?
Nick Hornby
#87. It is actually difficult to edit life. Especially in regard to feelings. Not being open to anger or sadness usually means being unable to be open to love and joy. The emotions seem to operate with an all-or-nothing switch.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#88. If I'm going to take my clothes off I figured I might as well do it for something that I'm directing myself since I had complete control of the edit.
Rachael Taylor
#89. Write for love, edit for perfection & publish to share that moment in time
Debbie Behan
#90. In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.
Stephen Colbert
#91. I get so carried away in interviews and deliver 1,500-word treatises, then find it's been reduced to something pithier but also not quite accurate. Although I imagine there are people I work with who wish they could edit me every day.
Bertie Carvel
#92. There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it's our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it's ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it.
Tim DeKay
#93. Yeah, we have a lot of cringey moments, but that's what makes it authentic. I think for it not to be cringey, me and Kate would have to go into the edit suite, but then it would look over produced. We see it at the same time as everyone else.
Peter Andre
#94. Try reading out loud when you edit your work. Your ears will pick out mistakes that your eyes are blind to.
L.F.Young
#95. In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.
Josh Radnor
#96. 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
#97. I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there.
Kim Cattrall
#98. Now is a very interesting time because of the digital cameras, and the fact that you can edit anywhere. It's a great time to be a filmmaker, is a great time to be starting off.
Michael Pitt
#99. I think I learned most from editing, both editing myself and having someone else edit me. It's not always easy to have someone criticize your work, your baby. But if you can swallow your ego, you can really learn from the editing.
Christopher Paolini
#100. 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
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