Top 100 Editor Quotes
#1. Notepad++ or any advanced editor. All you need to do is copy the code and paste it into Notepad. Upon execution, you will get the output as depicted in the
Aravind Shenoy
#2. It's weird: making a movie is like life compacted into three months. You have these very intense relationships with people, and you talk to them every day - your editor, the casting people, music people, your actors - then it ends. It's like a circus life.
Dito Montiel
#3. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.
Caitlin Horrocks
#4. I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'
Edmund White
#5. The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.
Nancy Kress
#6. Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it.
Mary Karr
#7. I have a huge editor in my head who's always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out.
David Chase
#8. Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Elbert Hubbard
#9. I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.
Stieg Larsson
#10. With trembling hands, Zach opened the front cover and flipped to the dedication page. To Zachary Easton, my editor. Fuck you.
Tiffany Reisz
#11. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.
Garrison Keillor
#12. The woman was Diana Vreeland, the high priestess of fashion and legendary fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar and editor-in-chief of Vogue. Dana paused, eyes wide. Well, perhaps she was a bit star-struck after all.
Lynn Steward
#13. You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
Frank Black
#14. Filmmaking has always involved pairs: a director coupled with a producer, a director alongside an editor ... The notion of couples is not foreign to cinema.
Luc Dardenne
#15. I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.
Claire Tomalin
#16. If John somehow turns into a different man and we do not witness that transformation, the editor considering your novel will somehow turn into an editor considering a different novel.
Howard Mittelmark
#17. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
Robert E. Howard
#18. I remember the first time I spoke to an editor. I thought I'd be sick, I was so nervous. The first time I spoke to a large group at a conference, I had the jitters for days beforehand.
Lori Foster
#19. I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.
Jonathan Galassi
#20. The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
Mary Karr
#21. The fuzzy boundary lines between different readership ages have always puzzled me, so these days I just write what comes, and assume I can fix the mess later with an editor's help.
Julie Berry
#22. It seems from my unique vantage point as both scientist and editor of JSE that substantial evidence exists of "something going on".
Bernard Haisch
#23. All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.
-from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)
George Michael Sinclair Kennedy
#24. Even the pool of ink could be dried out and writing papers could be burnt to ashes forever but the spoken word will never die so as the editor.
Euginia Herlihy
#25. That's what I try to do as a writer and as the editor of HuffPost: cover important stories in an obsessive way that enables them to break through the din of our multimedia universe.
Arianna Huffington
#26. Always point your finger at the chest of the person with whom you are being photographed. You will appear dynamic. And no photo editor can crop you from the picture.
Ken Auletta
#29. It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.
Liane Moriarty
#30. When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.
Len Wein
#31. As CEO, my main job is editor-in-chief.
Jack Dorsey
#32. If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.
Brian K. Vaughan
#34. I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money.
Andrew Tobias
#35. They'd even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young
Olivia Laing
#36. I'm so used to being separate from the publication process. I turn in the book to the editor and then I'm done.
Hilary Liftin
#37. I've never had to work out of the arts. I've always either been a writer or an editor, or something where I've made my living from doing what I love. You can't get any better than that.
Len Wein
#38. Of, course it always cheers a news editor when a story has what we describe as 'legs' therefore it, erm, runs.
Kamal Ahmed
#39. Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.
Jane Lindskold
#40. If the way ahead is not clear, time is often the best editor of one's intentions.
Jacqueline Winspear
#41. Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.
John Creasey
#42. An editor named Kerrie Hughes wanted me to write a short story that brought my fire-spider Smudge from my goblin books into the present-day world. I came up with libriomancy as a way to make that happen.
Jim C. Hines
#43. The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.
Steven Spielberg
#44. One of the great joys of launching your idea on the web is that it's a meritocracy. The good stuff will rise to the top and find an audience, and you don't have to impress one idiosyncratic commissioning editor.
Rob Manuel
#45. When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
Louis Sachar
#46. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.
Joel Spolsky
#47. From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.
Hanya Yanagihara
#48. I'm my own boss, my own editor, my own shooter, my own writer, everything. This is all stuff I learned through trial and error ... failing at a lot of things has taught me how to succeed at them eventually ... you roll with the punches.
Lilly Singh
#49. I think it's important for the public to know, great reporting starts with a publisher who has guts and an editor who has guts.
Dan Rather
#50. Deep Throat was a very unfortunate name given to the source by the managing editor of The Washington Post.
Bob Woodward
#51. Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain
#52. Writing a novel mimics what we bring to our journey of life. God is the great editor who purges the faulty, the awkward, and all the bits that are just plain wrong, so the optimal story can finally emerge.
Denise M. Baran-Unland
#53. The successful editor is one who is constantly finding newwriters, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success.
A. Scott Berg
#54. My job, as I see it, is to give you a window into another world and another story, and then to be as graceful as I can so that you don't feel my work or the editor's work or the lens or the light or anything.
Victor Levin
#55. Hours is an understatement. I honestly don't know how the director and editor decide each week what actually makes it on the air. There's of course director and cast commentary on each episode on the DVD. We had a blast recording that.
Joel McHale
#56. Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#57. I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."
Donna Tartt
#58. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.
David Benioff
#59. And so in addition to lots of reading, the life of an editor involves constantly trying to get others to read as well.
Keith Gessen
#60. We were working on 'Senna' for a long time before we were fully financed, so we didn't actually have an editor for a while.
Asif Kapadia
#61. You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
Seth Godin
#62. My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.
Walter Murch
#63. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#64. A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.
Irwin Shaw
#65. The great thing about stage is that you have more control. The stage is yours. The time is yours. Film is really the editor's medium.
Kenneth Cranham
#66. An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#67. I think even if you're on a screen or you're in a play, it's always a group effort. It's not just the actors, it's the editor.
Stockard Channing
#68. I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.
Kristin Cast
#69. I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.
Bill Joy
#70. Even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).
Anna Quindlen
#71. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
#72. How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.
Mark Twain
#73. I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.'
Judy Blume
#74. It is unsound for an independent editor to be a financial contributor to any cause which would cause any type of special pleading.
Walter Annenberg
#75. I'm trying to work only with established, respected directors. I took a lot of bad scripts and worked for a lot of lazy directors, and it was discouraging to go to the screenings and see that the director had added nothing, the editor had added nothing, there was nothing to see.
Michael Caine
#76. The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.
Courtney B. Vance
#77. While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
Cyril Connolly (English critic and editor, 1903-1974)
Cyril Connolly
#78. And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
Jerry Pournelle
#79. I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.
Anna Quindlen
#80. I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published.
James Gunn
#81. The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
Keith Rabois
#82. My father was this huge, influential intellectual in the '60s and '70s. He was one of the main players in the cultural discussion in Sweden, the editor of papers.
David Lagercrantz
#83. One guy records the voices, another guy times the storyboard, another guy times the sheets, one guy is the story editor. All these jobs should be covered by the director.
John Kricfalusi
#84. And my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Dan Simmons
#85. The information highway is being sold to us as delivering information, but what it's really delivering is data ... Unlike data, information has utility, timeliness, accuracy, a pedigree ... Editors serve as barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent saying no.
Clifford Stoll
#86. An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.
Guy Kawasaki
#87. I heard a story the other night about an editor who visited the Iowa Workshop and, when asked what sorts of books she published, replied, "Classic books." One of the students asked her, "You mean like Kafka?" Apparently she said, "Oh, I don't think I would publish Kafka."
Matthew Specktor
#88. I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying.
Corey Mesler
#89. I have an idea for a new book. It's a novel about a beautiful yet sensitive author whose spirit is crushed by her domineering editor. Do you like it?
Annie Barrows
#90. the editor who understands continuum of movement has an additional tool to manipulate the intensity of scenes and sequences.
Bruce Block
#91. If you ever go to talk to an editor you don't want to be able to turn down a job because you can't do what is necessary.
Mike Royer
#92. I started working for the 'NY Observer' when I was 33. After I had been writing for them for about a year and a half the editor said, 'Your stories are the most talked about stories in the 'Observer'; you should have your own column.'
Candace Bushnell
#93. Ask your agent to set up a meeting with either your editor or the marketing department of the house or both so you can find out what they're doing, what they aren't, and what you can do to help.
M.J. Rose
#94. ...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#95. With Digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
Kevin Rose
#96. Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#97. My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country's finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.
John Burnside
#98. Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works
Munia Khan
#99. I love the auditioning process. I love working with the technical guys. I absolutely love the editing room. That was completely fascinating to me, working with an editor in crafting the thing into something you had in your head.
Neil Gaiman
#100. Everything about being a copy editor is top secret - by default, really - because no one else cares.
Rainbow Rowell
