Top 52 Quotes About Good Editors
#2. I believe I'm a better writer now than I was when I started. I'm grateful that I had good guidance because you don't make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.
Sharon Draper
#3. I have to trust that if a story is strong, it can find its readership, and good editors can steer me well.
Julie Berry
#4. 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
#6. I depend on good editors and a good director.
Indira Varma
#7. I think you either have chemistry or you don't. If you could create chemistry in the editing room then there would be no films without chemistry, obviously, because there are a lot of good editors out there who'd be able to take care of that then if that's how it really worked.
Robert Schwentke
#8. There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
Stephen Ambrose
#9. Start with something messy, get to the point, get an editor, and make it good.
Rands
#10. Every writer needs an editor. I don't care how good you are or think you are.
Nora Roberts
#11. For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.
Laura Miller
#12. Scandal has a thousand stringers; good news doesn't know the editor's phone number.
William Raspberry
#13. 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
#14. That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.
Walter Jon Williams
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.
Karen Thompson Walker
#18. 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
#19. Not that I've always loved the movie when they finally come out, or if they ever come out-because many of them don't come out-but I've gotten to work with really good story editors and stuff like that.
John Sayles
#20. Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.
Meg Rosoff
#21. it's good to fail sometimes.When you fail, you have to prove yourself. That's often the best thing than can happen, because then you're sure your success isn't just luck. - Barbara Walters
The Editors Of O, The Oprah Magazine
#22. Get an agent. Seriously, submitting stuff unagented means it will end up on the slush pile. An agent is the first quality filter, and a good agent is worth his or her weight in gold, as they'll often know the editors on a personal level and will be able to talk to them directly about the project.
Tim Lebbon
#23. 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
#24. An editor's job is to take something great and make it good.
Kinky Friedman
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I think that they had afforded me many opportunities to do good work there, and I think I did. It was a wonderful four years. I really worked with some great people, terrific producers, terrific editors.
Connie Chung
#29. 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
#30. Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse.
Robert Anton Wilson
#31. A good editor is like tinsel to a Christmas Tree ... they add the perfect amount of sparkle without being gaudy.
Bobbi Romans
#32. 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
#33. I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.
Mark Twain
#34. If a good editor will let me tell my story with the right artist, I'm happy.
Brian K. Vaughan
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#38. 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
#39. An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.
Guy Kawasaki
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Being in New York, a lot of people I knew were top-notch copy editors or photo retouchers, so I had a good community around me that knew how to do the specialized stuff.
Ian Christe
#43. 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
#44. If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.
Robert Gottlieb
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.
Mark Twain
#49. Years working at a newspaper. You learn to write fast and reasonably good and in a manner which does not require substantial editing. Or your editors and copyeditors stab you to death and hang your corpse in the newsroom as a warning to the other staff writers.
John Scalzi
#50. A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'
Bob Shacochis
#51. 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
#52. 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
