Truman Capote
Author, Journalist
"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."
Editing quotes
Editing
459 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Hippocrates
Physician
"The chief virtue that language can have is clarity."
James Tate
Poet
"Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing."
Esther Freud
Author
"Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more."
Joe Dante
Film Director
"Editing is where movies are made or broken. Many a film has been saved and many a film has been ruined in the editing room."
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Topics related to Editing
Browse quotes that often appear alongside editing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Editing quotes (page 1 of 23)
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"No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published."
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"Editing might be a bloody trade. But knives aren't the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too."
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"The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."
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"I don't come from a film background. I haven't learned anything about films or film-making. But I have a thirst to know everything about my profession. I want to learn about cinematography, about editing, about music recordings, about post-production. So when people in the know talk, I willingly listen."
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"I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command."
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"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
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"The longer I write, the more important I believe it is to write the first draft as fast as possible. In drafting, I push myself so I am at the edge of discomfort...Later, it will be time for consideration and reconsideration, slow, careful revision and editing. But on the first draft I have to achieve velocity, just as you do if you want the bike to balance."
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"The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is."
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"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."
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"The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer."
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"The editing process, to use a slightly grim analogy, is like the slow suffocation of lots of babies. It's like, which finger do you want to cut off first?"
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"There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity."
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"Objectivity can only be the author's and therefore subjective, even if he is editing a newsreel."
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"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."
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"My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight."
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"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
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"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."
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"The essence of cinema is editing."
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"Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'"
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"The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy."
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