Top 100 Quotes About Editors
#2. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
Jane Yolen
#3. Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.
John Farrar
#4. I think editors are excellent marketers. They know their audience and produce copy to appeal to them - they just don't call it marketing.
David Robinson
#5. The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
H.L. Mencken
#6. In a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. Along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. But that's not actually what's happening right now.
Eli Pariser
#7. Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
Terri Windling
#8. 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
#9. I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
Lynn Abbey
#10. When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.
Nancy Gibbs
#11. When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
Thom Gunn
#12. I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.
Mark Twain
#13. I know and have worked alongside some of the designers, developers, and editors at Vox Media; you'd be proud to work with any of them.
Jeffrey Zeldman
#14. 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
#15. Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den.
George Vecsey
#17. Be sure to see that the first few pages have the reader on the edge of his seat, unable to put the book down. Most editors only have time to read a few pages before making a decision; make those pages memorable!
Judith Saxton
#18. It seems from my unique vantage point as both scientist and editor of JSE that substantial evidence exists of "something going on".
Bernard Haisch
#19. The worst part? Knowing that since a book this moving, this enthralling and enveloping comes along, as I said, only every once in a while, it will be many, many moons until we see its like again. - Sara Nelson
Amazon Books Editors
#20. 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
#21. The end of spring- the poet is brooding about editors.
Yosa Buson
#22. I've learned now to have a second title in reserve because, frequently, I come up with titles that seem to make editors' hair fall out.
Nalo Hopkinson
#24. You have to be very careful to view yourself with a somewhat skeptical eye and to remember that you're not here taking down everything I'm saying because you think I'm such a marvelous fellow but because your editors say go get 1,200 words or whatever on Chuck Heston.
Charlton Heston
#25. While editors and newspaper owners currently fret over shrinking readership and lost profits, they do the one thing that insures cutting their own throats; they keep reducing space for the one feature that attracts new young readers in the first place; the comic strips.
Elayne Boosler
#26. As CEO, my main job is editor-in-chief.
Jack Dorsey
#27. If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.
Brian K. Vaughan
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.
Anton Chekhov
#31. 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
#33. I pay editors. I never ask friends or colleagues to work for free.
Rigoberto Gonzalez
#34. Well digital media and social media are eliminating the middle man - in the old days, you had to go through the editors. Or the television producer, you know? Now you have people talking directly to each other, globally who have never met. I think you put the "word" in "word of mouth."
Kelly Cutrone
#35. We just have to come in every morning and somehow, launch the editor.
Joel Spolsky
#36. In early 1970, Newsweek's editors decided that the new women's liberation movement deserved a cover story. There was one problem, however: there were no women to write the piece.
Lynn Povich
#37. Most writers adore their editors, and I'm no exception.
Linda Sue Park
#38. They (fashion editors) have always been our secret weapon.
Anna Wintour
#39. Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose ... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.
David Ogilvy
#40. The successful editor is one who is constantly finding newwriters, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success.
A. Scott Berg
#42. Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.
Lord Chesterfield
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The error that we tend to make is that we think that women's magazines are what editors want and what their readers want - and thus are social indicators - when, in fact, they are what advertisers want. They're just advertising indicators.
Gloria Steinem
#46. You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.
M.J. Rose
#47. 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
#48. I dare say you will try to make me believe that Editors are human. Now I deny that, for I myself have, in past days, had evidence to the contrary.
Fanny Fern
#49. I learned a valuable lesson from that editorial experience, and it's served me well in just about every dealing I've had with editors since. If they say there's a problem, they're probably right. Believe them.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#50. You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.
Seth Godin
#51. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#52. What a pity when editors review a woman's book, that they so often fall into the error of reviewing the woman instead.
Fanny Fern
#53. In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.
Emma Donoghue
#54. 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
#55. Anyone who thinks designers don't talk to editors, and editors don't talk to stores doesn't know what's happening ... It's called crossover, sampling all references in music, art and fashion.
Marc Jacobs
#56. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
#57. To the small group of editors and designers who would launch Wired in January 1993, technology represented the future's best hope; but to the media, the tech boom was yesterday's story.
Gary Wolf
#58. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
William Faulkner
#59. You have to look at fashion from the perspective of high end editors and publications. Read all the magazines
commercial and underground
and your voice will evolve from what you see there.
Thakoon Panichgul
#60. 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
#61. Editors, for the most part, don't care 'what' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they ...
Tim Cahill
#62. The most important job of an editor is simplify, simplify simplify, and that usually means omitting things.
Keith Rabois
#63. There are so many magazines and so many editors out there that you have to be different.
Carine Roitfeld
#64. If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.
Dave Barry
#65. There really are so many lines of work that you can join that don't have to only be design. And that was one that particularly interested me a lot, because the editors could appreciate all the trends, all the designs and all the work of the designers.
Nina Garcia
#66. 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
#67. An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.
Guy Kawasaki
#68. Self-publishing worked for me. Being able to put your work in print, even if it's a tiny print-on-demand print run of a dozen or so copies, shows publishers and editors a completed piece of work and that you can follow through on a project.
Jeff Lemire
#69. You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.
Lorin Stein
#70. Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.
Julius Schwartz
#71. I have wanted to write from a young age, but working with so many gifted authors and editors over the years has taught me so much. I doubt I would be where I am today without that amazing experience.
Julie Klassen
#72. It's hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.
Christina Baker Kline
#73. 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
#74. I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
Kate Chopin
#75. Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.
Ben Bradlee
#76. The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.
Edmund White
#77. 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
#78. None of the editors I've worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They've never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events.
James Nachtwey
#79. I don't like to work in an office. I like to work in my house, to be among my own thoughts. The idea is for an editor to let his artist alone, let them be themselves, let them exchange their own ideas and you'll come up with something salable.
Jack Kirby
#80. The age of celebrity editors and monstrous staffing are over.
Felix Dennis
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
Colm Toibin
#84. As an editor, I must often tell writers that their stories "do not fit our present needs." But there are times when I want to reply: "Sir, I would not trust you to write a ransom note."
Richard Conniff
#85. When my editors and I at 'Rolling Stone' came up with the idea to do a profile of General McChrystal, I simply just e-mailed General McChrystal's press staff, said we wanted to do a profile, and said if you could give us any time to hang out with the general, that would be great.
Michael Hastings
#86. Science today is locked into paradigms. Every avenue is blocked by beliefs that are wrong, and if you try to get anything published by a journal today, you will run against a paradigm and the editors will turn it down
Fred Hoyle
#87. I really only became an editor, or started doing my own editing because I was filming the docs and you simply can't keep an editor on for as long as it takes so.
John Hyams
#88. One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.
John Gardner
#90. I had a wonderful and very successful career in New York and had the privilege of working with some of the best editors and publishers in the business.
Teresa Medeiros
#91. Critics for established venues are vetted by editors; they usually demonstrate a certain objectivity; and they come with known backgrounds and specialized knowledge.
Michael Dirda
#92. A good editor is like tinsel to a Christmas Tree ... they add the perfect amount of sparkle without being gaudy.
Bobbi Romans
#93. Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'
Mark Twain
#94. For the most part, editors no longer view 'Doonesbury' as a rolling provocation, which is fine by me. It makes no sense to intentionally antagonize the very people on whose support you most depend.
Garry Trudeau
#95. Most of the good people of my generation ... had offers to become editors, but the thought of going inside was just absolutely horrifying.
Jack Germond
#97. I have a secret goal with my editor - he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.
Chuck Palahniuk
#98. If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.
Robert Gottlieb
#99. You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.
Linwood Barclay
#100. I respect and empathize with reporters and editors who must compete in today's environment. And I know full well that when I've been covering campaigns, which I still do, I've made my mistakes and have been far from perfect.
Dan Rather
