Top 72 Good Editor Quotes
#1. A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much.
Irwin Shaw
#2. If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.
Brian K. Vaughan
#3. It was trying to make my tennis game look mildly respectable, which I found you don't even really need to practice if you have a really good editor. They can edit it and you're like, "Hey, it looks like I'm playing really well." That was the fun part, but it was like going to summer camp.
Paul Reiser
#4. A good editor is like a pair of Spanx: firming up the body, making the subject look good, and absolutely invisible.
Sandi Layne
#5. A photographer needs to be a good editor of negatives and prints! In fact, most of the prints I make are for my eyes only, and they are no good. I find the single most valuable tool in the darkroom is my trash can - that's where most of my prints end up.
John Sexton
#7. I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism.
K. Lee Lerner
#8. Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire.
Lisa Scottoline
#9. I've rewritten a lot of the scripts I've done. 'Little Shop Of Horrors' was a complete rewrite, but I didn't touch the dialogue. Essentially, I'm a very good editor.
Frank Oz
#10. The main thing is that you have a good editor - one that believes in you and who will give you the feedback that you need to produce a good book.
Christopher Darden
#11. A good editor fixes. A superb editor fixes without ruining the original message of your book as a superb translator does as well.
B.A. Gabrielle
#12. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
Kurt Vonnegut
#13. A very good editor is almost a collaborator.
Ken Follett
#14. Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
Peter Greenaway
#15. To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
Karen Thompson Walker
#16. Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.
Tucker Max
#17. 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
#18. An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.
Guy Kawasaki
#19. A good editor is like tinsel to a Christmas Tree ... they add the perfect amount of sparkle without being gaudy.
Bobbi Romans
#20. If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.
Robert Gottlieb
#21. The Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.
Jasper Fforde
#22. A good editor can make a respectable writer remarkable, just like a good parent helps a child become amazing.
Justin Alcala
#23. I don't tend to redraft, I will try to tidy it up, but basically I feel what I write down first has got the impetus, it may be clumsy, it may be repetitive, but a good editor can take that out. That first writing bit is the best thing you will do.
Gerald Seymour
#24. Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
Roddy Doyle
#26. I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.
Wolf Blitzer
#28. Every writer needs an editor. I don't care how good you are or think you are.
Nora Roberts
#29. Dare to be a sucky skateboarder or a lousy video editor or a completely crappy golfer. If we do only the stuff we're good at, we never learn anything new.
Justin Bieber
#30. I don't mind being identified as any character as long as I'm doing a good job as an actor. I have done all kinds of roles - from an editor, judge, police officer, murderer to a corrupt businessman.
Boman Irani
#31. Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
William Allen White
#32. I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.
Jostein Gaarder
#33. For 10 years, I'd been working as a freelance writer and editor, making money but not a living. It was a good arrangement family-wise, allowing me to stay home with our daughter, but not so great financially or, sometimes, ego-wise.
Will Allison
#34. Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.
Robert Gottlieb
#35. I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.
Mark Twain
#36. Scandal has a thousand stringers; good news doesn't know the editor's phone number.
William Raspberry
#37. Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.
Rands
#38. Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.
Don McCullin
#39. As good as' always spells mediocrity. But when a writer's work is in competition with all those thousands of other manuscripts that pour over an editor's desk, he cannot afford to be 'as good as'; he (or she) must be 'better than.
Phyllis A. Whitney
#40. I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, "That was pretty good, it might go better." Maybe that's what I'll try to find.
Craig Finn
#41. An editor's job is to take something great and make it good.
Kinky Friedman
#42. Part of the discipline of being an editor is that you have to be a good audience member; your work is to be a surrogate audience member on the films you are working on.
Jay Cassidy
#43. I was a good student - a geek, really - editor of the school paper, thought I was going to go to university.
Birgitte Hjort Sorensen
#44. To make good films, you have to have a good relationship and good collaboration as composer-director, composer-editor, composer-production designer-actor because you're working with the actors on screen.
Howard Shore
#45. They would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering, masturbating raven.
Nothing grabs an editor's eye like a good rape.
Hunter S. Thompson
#46. In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.
Finn Wittrock
#47. I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.
Chuck Klosterman
#48. I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.
Judith Krantz
#49. Few people read coffee-table photo books, and indeed they are not intended to be read. I find the text in these books is often surprisingly good, perhaps because the author
or more importantly, the editor
feels no need to pander.
Tyler Cowen
#50. Your writing is still yours, no matter what the contract or your editor might say. Trust your gut. It knows when you're screwing up. Your brain will lie to you. It loves the paycheck, it loves positive feedback. Your gut is under no obligation to make you feel good.
Gail Simone
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. And my editor, Tom Dupree, for his patience, enthusiasm, and shared good taste for loving Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Dan Simmons
#58. When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)
Daniel Quinn
#59. As his editor put it, Yeah, it's a piece of shit, but it's good shit.
Margaret Atwood
#60. I couldn't decide on a title for my first novel and my editor came up with Everything Good Will Come. After that, I thought I should name my own books.A Bit of Difference seems just right.
Sefi Atta
#61. I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman - in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.
Michael Chabon
#62. Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.
Kage Baker
#63. The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.
Eric Brown
#64. Film is an editor's medium. You can create very good raw material and they can make it horrible, or you can do not so well and they can make it beautiful. You don't really know.
Willem Dafoe
#65. I rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.
Wendelin Van Draanen
#66. There's really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#67. A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
#68. An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material - the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become.
Gudjon Bergmann
#69. My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
V.S. Naipaul
#70. Having been an editor for more than a decade, I thought I had a good idea of how much work was involved in writing a novel. I was wrong! Writing is a lot harder than I ever imagined - but worth it.
Julie Klassen
#71. I think that being an editor, someone who works with words, is very good training for being a translator because it trains you to be attentive to words in a very specific, very concrete, very literal way.
Ann Goldstein
#72. You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.
Dorianne Laux
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