Self Editing Quotes

Our emotional valence – positive or negative experiences – affects not only how we narrate childhood events, but also which memories we retain. The interplay between a person encountering environment experiences meshed with self-editing of various aspects of their complex memory system results in a person becoming more than a collection of memories: a person creates their personalized version of a self. A person integrates many experiences into creating their being. Personal encounters with other people as well as moments of personal solitude contemplating ideas and personal existence congeal to form the depiction of a self. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts. ~ Ted Chiang

When I'm self-editing, I search for all those 'was'es and 'were's and see if I can write the sentences better without them. I usually can. This one tip made a huge difference to the quality of my prose. ~ Tahlia Newland

Writing is all about self-editing; it's all about being present being aware of what's happening ~ Joan Armatrading

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread. ~ Noah Lukeman

Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it's finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it's too long, I'll start cutting. ~ Nick Cave

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again. ~ David Mitchell

Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side. ~ Eric T. Benoit

You have to know what you're shooting. Don't just make your movie in the editing room and just get everything you can on the day. ~ Patrick Wilson

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~ Samuel Johnson

Well, I would tell Danny. I'd probably edit for Josh. That is if there was
anything worth editing.
"Joshua Roberts, you had better get your butt on the move!" Danny
hollered as he walked down the stairs.
I was nervously waiting for them to leave as I pretended to watch TV in
the front room.
"We're going to be late."
"So the hair crisis is under control I see."
"A stray hair will never win between a bottle of gel and a gay man," he
declared with a smile. "Joshua!"
"I'm coming. I'm coming."
I heard his sandals click on the stairs and I waited to see if the mental
image matched the real one. To my non surprise it did. ~ Kaitlin Scott

The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes. ~ Judith Thurman

I love being on stage if I'm not on a set. If I'm at home, I'm usually in my office editing or reconstructing my website or whatever it may be. I just love putting creativity into a performance, so if the right script comes along, and I certainly am reading comedies and dramas now, then I'm ready willing and able to give it a shot. ~ Dane Cook

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench

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

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn't trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he'd been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.
I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class...
"Stories aren't real," he told me shortly. "They don't feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding 'family' in the nearest gang."
Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. "Write down the names of some books," she said. "Maybe we'll read them."
I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young live ~ Terri Windling

I'm a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it's a process I've been doing since I was younger. ~ Lana Del Rey

One of the first decisions I made, as the director of "Hide and Seek," was that our film would be silent and use underscoring of original music that I was planning on composing. The decision was mostly predicated on knowing how time consuming the editing of dialogue can be and given the various locations we shot in, I didn't want to worry about having to mix room tones in such a short amount of time. ~ Garth Kravits

I made a deal with myself that whenever I smoke weed, I have to be doing something productive: writing, recording, cutting a podcast, editing, etc. ~ Kevin Smith

A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Well, Toronto, I consider to be the birthplace of my films. I've made three films and this is the third one to premiere here in the same theater on the same day at the same time - they are my audience. They're the people that I think about while I'm writing, directing, and editing. I specifically make movies for them. ~ Jason Reitman

We achieve originality of style not by avoiding the influences of others but by blending them into a combination that has not been heard before. ~ Scott Norton

I write, "Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue couch," read that, wince, cross out "came into the room" and "down" and "blue" (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it's blue?) and the sentence becomes "Jane sat on the couch – " and suddenly, it's better (Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived, simply, at "Jane", which at least doesn't suck, and has the virtue of brevity. ~ George Saunders

Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity. ~ Michael Dirda

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

Teaching translation is more of an editing job. You act as editor. But you can have fun with it. ~ Gregory Rabassa

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely! ~ David Hockney

Editing. This never-ending maze through which I run, searching soulful nooks for the faintest shimmers of solace or escape. There is no such comfort. I tread this treacherous path of shadows, this menacing labyrinth that never stops beckoning. I'm like a woman whose soul is possessed, standing on the edge. It wants me. Calls to me. Consumes my every thought. Closing my eyes, my arms open wide. Submitting, I fall in. ~ Kristine Cheney

If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked. ~ Bill Walsh

Every time I sit down to write, I need to commit to a word count goal, otherwise I waste too much time editing and re-editing my previous work, staring dreamily off into space, pretending that I'm thinking profound, poetic thoughts when really I'm just thinking, 'Look at me being a writer! I'm so happy I'm a writer!' ~ Liane Moriarty

Bam! That's me off the cuff. Blunt and in your face. No editing. I think it. I say it. You read it. Sometimes I don't even think it, I just say it. ~ Stephen Colbert

Sit down and 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. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it. ~ David Shields

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

I was fooled a bit during 'Laguna Beach.' I was 17, 18 years old, and I thought they just wanted to shoot a documentary, and that it probably wouldn't end up anywhere, anyway. Little did we know about the power of editing. I had no idea that it was going to be the soap drama that it was, but I picked up on that pretty quickly. ~ Stephen Colletti

Basically, I composed the musical structure in one pass. The rest was editing and small adjustments. And when the play was read by actors with the music, the sequence timed-out perfectly. ~ Jeff Britting

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words. ~ Hippocrates

Association for Policy Analysis and Management. This list of thanks would be incomplete without special mention of Jo Turpin, who provided stellar research assistance and spent countless hours editing the entire manuscript. Her work helped us find that plain voice we had so long forgotten after writing so many pages in scholarly journals for our research colleagues. We also thank the five anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of the manuscript, senior staff especially, Jennifer Burnszynski, our long-time colleague, Elaine Sorensen, and Debra Pontisso ~ Ronald B. Mincy

We love seeing raw truth and openness in other people, but we're afraid to let them see it in us. We're afraid that our truth isn't enough - that what we have to offer isn't enough without the bells and whistles, without editing, and impressing. ~ Brene Brown

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films. ~ Martin Scorsese

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~ James A. Michener