Quotes About Writing And Editing

#1. The slow turtle wins the race!" at it pertains to writing and editing well.

Dennis De Rose

#2. I never go to the monitor. I just look at the camera monitor and my favorite part of all of the directing, except for the writing and editing of it, is right when we're rolling and they do lines and I'll say "Try this, try this, try this."

Will Gluck

#3. I'm so busy writing and editing two books a year that I don't have time for painting anymore.

Janet Evanovich

#4. 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

#5. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Lily King

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ...

Susi Moore

#9. I grew up on film sets but more around the process of making films. I saw a lot of the editing process and the writing process, which takes years. That really affected me growing up, that side of it.

Alice Englert

#10. The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

Rian Johnson

#11. I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say ... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.

Brent Weeks

#12. There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.

Ella Dominguez

#13. You should edit before and after editing.

Dwayne Fry

#14. 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

#15. I'm so independent in writing stuff and controlling what I do. Sometimes I get calls from people asking to be in their movie, but I'm always writing or editing, and I can never get around to doing it. I'm so much more interested in my own stuff. I think I drive my agent crazy.

Chris Lilley

#16. 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

#17. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

George Carlin

#18. 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

#19. I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

Don Roff

#20. With the enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature, we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection, judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book, but it requires high skill to make an index.

Rossiter Johnson

#21. I've reached that final moment of editing a book - the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face.

Richard Due

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

Guy Kawasaki

#23. Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.

Steven Pinker

#24. Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form.
[Letter to Max E. Feckler, Oct. 26, 1914]

Jack London

#25. I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.

Jeanne Voelker

#26. My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.

Dennis Cooper

#27. When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Stephen King

#28. Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

Gina McKnight

#29. I love meeting 'the Odd Man Out' - like fans of 'Baywatch' who regret, as I do, that Tower 12 Productions didn't put nearly as much energy into writing and directing the show as they put into photographing and editing it.

Nicole Eggert

#30. 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

#31. To write three series a year you only need to commit to writing 10 pages per day, or editing 50 pages of text per day. Plus, writing is my job, and I need to write to eat, so I'm highly motivated to get up and get to work!

Victoria Laurie

#32. I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.

William Manchester

#33. Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

Guy Kawasaki

#34. A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

Craig Newmark

#35. I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

Libba Bray

#36. [I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!

Mary Roberts Rinehart

#37. 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

#38. It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.

Anthony Marais

#39. Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity ... edit one more time!

C.K. Webb

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

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#41. At some point we must stop editing everyone else' story and start writing our own.

John E. Carson

#42. I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

Karen Thompson Walker

#43. I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

Alexander Payne

#44. There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

Charles Bukowski

#45. You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.

Courage Knight

#46. I quickly realized that I enjoyed editing more than writing. I felt more suited to it and it fit my nurturing personality. I had lots of ideas and a strong sense of structure, and I enjoyed working with talented writers, relishing the give-and-take in making their work better.

Lynn Povich

#47. The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.

Terry Tempest Williams

#48. I've been writing for years and developing my own films and editing with a friend of mine in Australia.

Aden Young

#49. 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

#50. Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

David Mitchell

#51. 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

#52. The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#53. manuscript
meanuscript
moanuscript
manurescript
and so on

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#54. 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

#55. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Arthur Plotnik

#56. 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

#57. I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

Werner Herzog

#58. I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.

Mark Ruffalo

#59. 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

#60. Basically, editing is done in rehearsal and in the writing process and in the acting, so it's very, very tricky, very, very tricky.

Julie Delpy

#61. Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

Paul Di Filippo

#62. If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

Pearl S. Buck

#63. 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

#64. [S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

Joan Silber

#65. Words are both my vocation and my avocation - reading, writing, editing, teaching.

Christina Baker Kline

#66. Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.

Ira Glass

#67. I put myself in the place of the listener when editing my writing. The last thing that I want to do is be preached at and told who to be or what to think when listening to an artist. However, I do want to be inspired. There's a fine line.

Macklemore

#68. Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught - prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

Donald Barthelme

#69. A movie is a creative process from its conception, through its writing, to its execution, to the editing. I think with the best films there is some kind of contribution from one person all the way through that. The best films are made by people who write, direct, and edit, so there's continuity.

Simon Pegg

#70. Writing a novel is like pottery. Your initial draft of your story is like a lump of clay. Editing is like shaping that piece of clay into something interesting and beautiful.

Monika Pardon

#71. A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Ernest Hemingway,

#72. A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.

T. Davis Bunn

#73. To be a film director is not a democracy, it's really a tyranny. You're the head of the project, for better rather than worse. I write the film and I direct the film, I decide who's going to be in it, I decide on the editing, I put in the music from my own record collection.

Woody Allen

#74. Editing is like walking across a room strewn with rose petals and thorns. When you can walk across mostly unbloodied, you're finished.

Richard Due

#75. Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Red Red Rover

#76. Save the gerund and screw the whale.

Tom Stoppard

#77. I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical.

Ricky Gervais

#78. 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

#79. Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

Stephen King