Quotes About Being An Editor

#1. But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

Peter Davison

#2. Being an editor doesn't make you a better writer - or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer.

Joseph Kanon

#3. The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.

Terri Windling

#4. Passion for books is the most important thing in being an editor/translator. Work with love.

Listiana Srisanti

#5. 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

#6. Being an editor has been a source of great satisfaction, but writing is the thing I truly love.

Bill Keller

#7. 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

#8. I like being an editor, and I know how to make a magazine.

Roberto Civita

#9. The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

Tony Hillerman

#10. This sound self-serving, but being interested in everything makes you a more effective opportunist - and that's what an editor has to be, a student of unintended consequences.

Terry McDonell

#11. I was the editor of the school newspaper and in drama club and choir, so I was not a popular girl in the traditional sense, but I think I was known for being relatively scathing.

Tina Fey

#12. 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

#13. It's possible for an editor to break down a dream, if you like, into its components and being able to shoot the wide shots in sunshine, when the weather was at its best and you know, we would get sort of almost a 3D effect sometimes if you chose the right time of day to shoot the thing.

John Glen

#14. 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

#15. I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

Richard Branson

#16. of experience at the Privy Council Office who was hired to be an editor of the French translation but ended up being a primary editor of the entire report. I headed

Kevin Page

#17. The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

Alice Sebold

#18. I think I'm becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I'll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It's more of an actor's medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

Michael Sheen

#19. Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.

Tucker Max

#20. Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?

Thomas Carlyle

#21. 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

#22. The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
-Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) US-English essayist, editor, anthologist

Logan Pearsall Smith

#23. I didn't understand in the beginning that the editor didn't want me to know the author. I'd make an effort to meet the author, but it would end up being a disaster because then I had the author telling me what I should be doing.

Peter Sis

#24. Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)

Kate Christensen

#25. Although being economics editor sounds impressive, it does not mean I actually edit anything. It mainly reflects two decades of title-inflation at the BBC, which has given ever more status to senior reporters, presumably because it is cheaper to do that than to offer higher pay.

Evan Davis

#26. I am the discoverer of Quantum Editing, the process whereby the amateur editor keeps being changed by the editing he does, requiring him to further edit the manuscript, changing him yet further, etc.

Matt Chatelain

#27. Everything about being a copy editor is top secret - by default, really - because no one else cares.

Rainbow Rowell

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Obviously, you know, I am known as an action director, and being a film editor previously had been a great advantage for me as an action director.

John Glen

#37. Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.

Karen Thompson Walker

#38. A good editor is like tinsel to a Christmas Tree ... they add the perfect amount of sparkle without being gaudy.

Bobbi Romans

#39. To Grandma,
for being my first editor and giving me the best writing advice I've ever received: Christopher, I think you should wait until you're done with elementary school before worrying about being a failed writer.

Chris Colfer

#40. As a painter you're responsible yourself, 100 percent. In film, you have the editor, the director, the other actors. It has the advantage of not being solitary.

Sylvia Kristel

#41. I think one of the best jobs in the universe must be being the editor of 'The New Yorker', but there are a number of magazines that I'd be excited to be the editor of. They would be 'Wired', 'The New Yorker' and probably, 'Vogue'.

Michael Wolf

#42. I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.

Evan Hunter

#43. Being sixteen means you have to be a genius conversational editor.

Maureen Johnson

#44. Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

Michael Tilson Thomas