Top 100 Writing Editing Quotes
#1. Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving.
Neel Burton
#2. Words are both my vocation and my avocation - reading, writing, editing, teaching.
Christina Baker Kline
#3. You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.
Keith Rabois
#4. I've reached that final moment of editing a book - the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face.
Richard Due
#5. Editing might be a bloody trade. But knives aren't the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too.
Blake Morrison
#6. It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.
Anthony Marais
#7. Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity ... edit one more time!
C.K. Webb
#8. As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing.
Katerina Stoykova Klemer
#9. At some point we must stop editing everyone else' story and start writing our own.
John E. Carson
#10. I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.
Karen Thompson Walker
#11. A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.
Craig Newmark
#12. Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the best of his writing.
K.M. Soehnlein
#13. It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.
Betsy Lerner
#14. In writing, there is art. And in art there is craft ...
Susi Moore
#15. I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say ... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.
Brent Weeks
#16. When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.
Richard B. Knight
#17. I stayed at 'Cosmo' well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large - editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal's memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself.
John Searles
#18. There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.
Ella Dominguez
#19. You should edit before and after editing.
Dwayne Fry
#20. I'm so independent in writing stuff and controlling what I do. Sometimes I get calls from people asking to be in their movie, but I'm always writing or editing, and I can never get around to doing it. I'm so much more interested in my own stuff. I think I drive my agent crazy.
Chris Lilley
#21. The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.
Christos Tsiolkas
#22. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.
George Carlin
#23. I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.
Don Roff
#24. Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.
Patricia Fuller
#26. With the enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature, we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection, judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book, but it requires high skill to make an index.
Rossiter Johnson
#27. Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.
Sydney Pollack
#28. When reading I pretend I'm an editor, though when writing I realize I'm not.
Fierce Dolan
#29. Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.
Quincy Jones
#30. The process of editing a piece of writing seems sometimes a lot like natural selection. Your efforts never really eliminate the mistakes. You just cause them to evolve into a sneakier, more robust breed.
John A. Ashley
#31. If you treat editing like you're making an abridged version of your book, it can help determine what's vital vs what can be cut.
Kira Hawke
#32. Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form.
[Letter to Max E. Feckler, Oct. 26, 1914]
Jack London
#33. My novels tend to take a long time to become exactly what they're going to be. They're fluid messes until I've done a ton of editing and refining and rewriting. When I write novels, I always make related scrapbooks to help me organize and test my intentions.
Dennis Cooper
#34. When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
Stephen King
#35. Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.
Gina McKnight
#36. I love meeting 'the Odd Man Out' - like fans of 'Baywatch' who regret, as I do, that Tower 12 Productions didn't put nearly as much energy into writing and directing the show as they put into photographing and editing it.
Nicole Eggert
#38. Writing is all about self-editing; it's all about being present being aware of what's happening
Joan Armatrading
#39. Writing is like shadow boxing. Editing is when the shadows fight back.
Adam Copeland
#40. Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
(Casual Chance, 1964)
Colette
#41. Slowed time is -- or should be -- a way of pointing to what's important.
Joan Silber
#42. People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes
Chris Abani
#43. The editing of a good piece of writing is like the editing of one's life: never quite complete; rendering all, ultimately, unfinished works when we perish from this earth.
K.C. Woodworth
#44. I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.
William Manchester
#45. Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face.
Guy Kawasaki
#46. It's easier to teach a poet how to read a balance sheet than it is to teach an accountant how to write.
Henry R. Luce
#47. I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.
Jeanne Voelker
#48. I was a young guy who started as a fact checker," he said, "but I always knew - and was told - that I would get a shot at reporting, writing, and editing. For a young, ambitious, talented woman, that elevator was out of order.
Lynn Povich
#49. I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.
Libba Bray
#50. Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.
Stephen King
#52. Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.
Dark Jar Tin Zoo
#53. Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
Gene Fowler
#54. I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
#55. You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.
Courage Knight
#56. I quickly realized that I enjoyed editing more than writing. I felt more suited to it and it fit my nurturing personality. I had lots of ideas and a strong sense of structure, and I enjoyed working with talented writers, relishing the give-and-take in making their work better.
Lynn Povich
#57. Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.
Stephanie Roberts
#58. I think Gram did his best work in co-writes. Sometimes when you're working with one other person, it's such a magical thing. You're editing each other and you're trying to create that one spark.
Chris Hillman
#59. Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
David Mitchell
#60. I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.
Jack McClelland
#61. Your job as an executive is to edit, not write. It's OK to write once in a while but if you do it often there's a fundamental problem with the team. Every time you do something ask if you're writing or editing and get in the mode of editing.
Jack Dorsey
#62. Being discouraged is natural but giving up is not an option.
Court Young
#63. The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#64. Editing one's writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.
Fennel Hudson
#65. There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.
Charles Bukowski
#66. The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.
Walter Mosley
#67. Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#68. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Arthur Plotnik
#69. We achieve originality of style not by avoiding the influences of others but by blending them into a combination that has not been heard before.
Scott Norton
#70. Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.
Horace
#71. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#72. There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.
Fred Rodell
#73. I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.
Barack Obama
#74. Basically, editing is done in rehearsal and in the writing process and in the acting, so it's very, very tricky, very, very tricky.
Julie Delpy
#75. Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.
Paul Di Filippo
#76. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
Lily King
#77. I have a real problem with bloat
I write like fat ladies diet.
Stephen King
#78. Caesar is not above the grammarians.
Tiberius
#79. You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing.
Guy Kawasaki
#80. Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas.
Steven Pinker
#82. I find that the majority of the year, I don't spend acting. I spend it either writing or editing or producing, or putting things together. So it's as shocking as it is tragic. I really enjoy it. It's a valuable skill set. I certainly feel like more of a grownup.
Charlie Day
#83. One of the biggest differences between you and a traditionally published author is that a self-pubbed author is responsible for everything. Not just writing the book - but cover design, editing, producing, distribution, and publicity as well.
M.J. Rose
#84. A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.
Joan Silber
#85. If you don't hate your darlings a little by the time they go to press, you haven't edited them enough.
S. Kelley Harrell
#86. Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.
Don Roff
#87. A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.
Ernest Hemingway,
#88. [S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.
Joan Silber
#90. A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.
T. Davis Bunn
#91. Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.
Terry McDonell
#92. Editing is like walking across a room strewn with rose petals and thorns. When you can walk across mostly unbloodied, you're finished.
Richard Due
#93. I have an amazing team; I have amazing producers; I have amazing writers, but at the end of it, it's me making the decisions on the writing, the tone, the editing.
Ellen DeGeneres
#95. The editing process is a necessary evil. I can write until the cows come home but it is all garbage until it gets edited.
Kim Smith
#96. Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.
Chuck Wendig
#97. While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.
Tiffany Madison
#98. I visited England immediately after I finished writing 'The Marrying Season,' before any editing or revisions.
Candace Camp
#99. Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.
A.J. Flowers
#100. Everything I do with my day is related to Superwoman. I'm either doing conference calls or writing a script or reading a script, editing a video, shooting a video.
Lilly Singh
