Good Editing Quotes

#1. A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor.

Sofia Coppola

#2. In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.

Viggo Mortensen

#3. No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

Merilyn Simonds

#4. Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.

Robert Gottlieb

#5. Even the structure of the atom has been found by the mind. Therefore the mind is subtler than the atom. That which is behind the mind, namely the individual soul, is subtler than the mind.

Ramana Maharshi

#6. A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing.

Oliver Harris

#7. I think we filmed a lot of the recording and it would be nice to do something with it but you know, videos are tricky because we know how to make albums but I'm not very good at video editing .

Jess Margera

#8. Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.

Naveed Saleh

#9. I remember doing one day of work, and I was so good I ended up doing 25 days on that movie. And all of it ended up on the editing room floor. That was my first Hollywood lesson: Just because you filmed a movie doesn't necessarily mean that you're in it.

Eddie Griffin

#10. We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create ... It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!

C.K. Webb

#11. Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

Mary Stuart Masterson

#12. It's good to get away from the editing suite. It's very unhealthy to be sitting in front of the screen for too long.

Christian Marclay

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

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#14. Sound and Visual Effects and Editing are sometimes referred to as technical awards. They're not technical awards. They're given for artistic decisions. And sometimes we make them better than others, and I guess we made a couple of good ones on this one.

Randy Thom

#15. 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

#16. A good editor is like a pair of Spanx: firming up the body, making the subject look good, and absolutely invisible.

Sandi Layne

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

Alex Kapranos

#18. I'm not a writer, but I'm very good at editing. That's my specialty. I can read something and tell you everything that's wrong with it and what's great about it and what needs to change, but it's hard for me to organize my thoughts.

Tracy Pollan

#19. I think you either have chemistry or you don't. If you could create chemistry in the editing room then there would be no films without chemistry, obviously, because there are a lot of good editors out there who'd be able to take care of that then if that's how it really worked.

Robert Schwentke

#20. A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.

S. Kelley Harrell

#21. There is anxiety, but it comes after you've finished filming because it's out of your hands; people are editing it, they're cutting it, marketing it. And it's ... part your career sort of rides on that. But when you're actually filming it's a team thing and it really feels good there for me.

Hugh Jackman

#22. There are objects you may desire but cannot explain. There are objects that are not nouns, there are actions that are not verbs. There are things we want that exist at the edge of the forest, at the rim of the ocean, just over the hill, just out of sight.

Charles Yu

#23. As an actor for hire, my job is to do some pre-production work for myself. Then my job is to show up and give the best performance I can.

Matthew McConaughey

#24. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.

Terri Windling

#25. Never doubt in the darkness what God has told you in the light.

Warren W. Wiersbe

#26. The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it's really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it's not really good for generating ideas.

Austin Kleon

#27. One of the advantages of shooting digitally was that we had a lot of time. When you shoot, even if you do a good performance, it may get lost in the editing room. It's just one more way that a potentially good film might go astray.

William Mapother

#28. There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'

Spike Jonze

#29. I'm interested in pitches that have compelling people and ideas at the core - and a good news peg certainly doesn't hurt. We look for stories that are solutions-oriented, but not irrationally upbeat, from writers with a strong voice. For LadyJournos, where I'm curating not editing.

Ann Friedman

#30. The modern choice is between non-violence or non-existence.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#31. What they all knew was this: Life was fragile.

Kaya McLaren

#32. 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

#33. Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.

Vladimir Lenin

#34. 'The Newsroom' is phenomenally bad good TV. Sam Waterston and Jeff Daniels and Emily Mortimer are all terrific! So is the production, and the direction, and even the editing!

Alex Pareene

#35. When it comes to the ratings, I don't know what the rating system is. So when it comes to me, I've learned, with the little experience that I have, that when I feel really good about a movie in the editing room, it works. And when I've felt like a movie wasn't working, it didn't work.

Tim Story

#36. I'm really specific in the way that I shoot. I've always had a very good sense of what I need in the editing room.

Jason Reitman