Editing Quotations | Page 5

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

For better or worse, editing is what editors are for; and editing is selection and choice of material. That editors newspaper or broadcast can and do abuse this power is beyond doubt, but that is no reason to deny the discretion Congress provided.

Finding the fine line between satisfying a daytime TV audience and an afternoon radio audience. That involved editing down my delivery to under an hour. I've been blessed to have great producers and a great staff to achieve that. I have a small team but they're very efficient.

With the camera, it's all or nothing. You either get what you're after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don't think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.

Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

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.

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.

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."

There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

The Conversation' was the first film I edited on a flatbed machine - a KEM editing machine. I've been using Final Cut or the AVID for 12 years now, so I was interested in looking at this film and seeing if I could tell if it had been edited the old way.

When you're in the editing room, as a director, you get the opportunity to look at your work. As a writer, you can rewrite. But as an actor, unless you're watching playback, you really rely on the director to help you.

I've lived through the shooting of movie, the editing and every other process along the way, so it's not for me to really judge it. I'll probably look at it again five years from now to get a fresh feel for it.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

LICKSPITTLE, n. A useful functionary, not infrequently found editing a newspaper . . . the lickspittle is only the blackmailer under another aspect, although the latter is frequently found as an independent species.

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.

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.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.

Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.

I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

I never ever see a film of mine after I release it to the public. I see it when I shoot it in my dailies and while I'm editing it, re-editing it and reshooting it and all that. By the time it's finished I never want to see it again.

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.

The content dictates the style all the time. That's the way it is. If the content of the film is highly jagged, neurotic, fast-paced, it just called for that kind of shooting, editing and performance.

I never start editing a film until it's completely shot; I don't edit along the way, ever. When it's finished I come in here and we start with reel one, scene one and start editing shot by shot by shot until we're finished.