Quotes by Editors

it is not the first language that is all-important, but which language captures the adolescent's imagination when he or she first discovers literature.
Ned Thomas
The world may be about to end, but if it's going to end, we'll goddamn well give it our best shot first. And this is the place to do it.
Alex Irvine
We grab handfuls of bottles and climb up onto the roof of the house. She stumbles and her foot slips into the gutter sopped with dead leaves. I grab her wrists and pull her clear – sure, she's not the person I'd choose to do this with, but she's my only option so I might as well be nice. Plus I don't want her to drop the vodka.
Kirsty Logan
Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses—one black, one white, and the third red.
Holly Black
Will the last person on the planet please turn off the lights?
John Joseph Adams
Throughout human history beauty has been seen as a gift from God, but Mom had another notion; she thought that beauty could be earned through self-knowledge. It may be a revolutionary idea, but it has offered me great comfort.
Ruth Reichl
I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, thinking that nobody really likes marriage, that it's a flawed arrangement, that people get enthusiastic and jump in for a hundred reasons and then, after the ceremony, after a few years, the whole deal turns into a concert they wouldn't have dreamed of attending.
Frederick Barthelme
Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station—the Gare D'Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?
Margaret Anderson
There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don't leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened and humiliated secretary of state will have to pay.
Jack Shafer
This isn't a crush, it's obsession.You are never not in my thoughts. Your scent carries across a room and paralyzes me with longing. I don't want to hold your hand. Part of me wants to set you on fire and hold you while the flame consumes us both, to eat your heart so I know that only I possess it entirely.
Gwen Hayes
If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
Arthur Plotnik
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
Sol Stein
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?...Simplify, simplify.
William Zinsser
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
William Zinsser
Voice is really about letting your characters loose.
C.S. Lakin
The invisibility factor of women in this industry is not unlike the invisibility of girl geeks. We know we exist, but everyone else seems to think we’re an enigma every time they get the notion to write about us and what we apparently want. What we want isn’t any different than what anyone wants. Good stories. With characters we can relate to or identify with or that are interesting to read about. And we’d like to feel welcome, not the perpetual other. We don’t want to feel excluded or like props in every narrative. We don’t want or need every story to be about a girl character. But we’d like them to be treated with the same care and attention male characters are. And it is possible, even in male dominated narratives.
Mariah Huehner
Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.
Allison K. Williams
Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.
Renni Browne
Beer gurgled through the beard. 'You see,' the young man began, 'the desert's so big you can't be alone in it. Ever notice that? It's all empty and there's nothing in sight, but there's always something moving over there where you can't quite see it. It's something very dry and thin and brown, only when you look around it isn't there. Ever see it?''Optical fatigue -' Tallant began.'Sure. I know. Every man to his own legend. There isn't a tribe of Indians hasn't got some way of accounting for it. You've heard of the Watchers? And the twentieth-century white man comes along, and it's optical fatigue. Only in the nineteenth century things weren't quite the same, and there were the Carkers.''You've got a special localized legend?''Call it that. You glimpse things out of the corner of your mind, same like you glimpse lean, dry things out of the corner of your eye. You incase 'em in solid circumstance and they're not so bad. That is known as the Growth of Legend. The Folk Mind in Action. You take the Carkers and the things you don't quite see and put 'em together. And they bite.'Tallant wondered how long that beard had been absorbing beer. 'And what were the Carkers?' he prompted politely.'Ever hear of Sawney Bean? Scotland - reign of James the First or maybe the Sixth, though I think Roughead's wrong on that for once. Or let's be more modern - ever hear of the Benders? Kansas in the 1870's? No? Ever hear of Procrustes? Or Polyphemus? Or Fee-fi-fo-fum?'There are ogres, you know. They're no legend. They're fact, they are. The inn where nine guests left for every ten that arrived, the mountain cabin that sheltered travelers from the snow, sheltered them all winter till the melting spring uncovered their bones, the lonely stretches of road that so many passengers traveled halfway - you'll find 'em everywhere. All over Europe and pretty much in this country too before communications became what they are. Profitable business. And it wasn't just the profit. The Benders made money, sure; but that wasn't why they killed all their victims as carefully as a kosher butcher. Sawney Bean got so he didn't give a damn about the profit; he just needed to lay in more meat for the winter.'And think of the chances you'd have at an oasis.''So these Carkers of yours were, as you call them, ogres?''Carkers, ogres - maybe they were Benders. The Benders were never seen alive, you know, after the townspeople found those curiously butchered bodies. There's a rumor they got this far West. And the time checks pretty well. There wasn't any town here in the 80s. Just a couple of Indian families - last of a dying tribe living on at the oasis. They vanished after the Carkers moved in. That's not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway. Nobody worried about them. But they used to worry about why so many travelers never got across this stretch of desert. The travelers used to stop over at the Carkers, you see, and somehow they often never got any further. Their wagons'd be found maybe fifteen miles beyond in the desert. Sometimes they found the bones, too, parched and white. Gnawed-looking, they said sometimes.''And nobody ever did anything about these Carkers?''Oh, sure. We didn't have King James the Sixth - only I still think it was the First - to ride up on a great white horse for a gesture, but twice there were Army detachments came here and wiped them all out.''Twice? One wiping-out would do for most families.'Tallant smiled at the beery confusion of the young man's speech.'Uh-huh, That was no slip. They wiped out the Carkers twice because you see once didn't do any good. They wiped 'em out and still travelers vanished and still there were white gnawed bones. So they wiped 'em out again. After that they gave up, and people detoured the oasis.("They Bite")
Anthony Boucher
She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.
Holly Black
The sky grows dark over the city as Janey tells me her story. Teh beast was supposed to help their community. Something that would look good in a brochure, I suppose. But instead, it cut loose, took out in to the Williamsburg night. Janey and the kids went after it , and when they finally caught up what does it do? The thing ate a hipster.
Daniel José Older
Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.
Holly Black
Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.
Holly Black
The FDA just ordered them off the market. The glaze is supposed to be poison—provided you drink at least forty cups of tea out of one of them every day of your life for twenty years.
Frederik Pohl
...there was a certain comfort in surrender.
Adam Langer
The editorial job has become unlike the ancient age when one judged what one read a job of making judgements on outlines ideas reputations previous books scenarios treatments talk and promises.
Sam Vaughan
You have to throw yourself away when you write.
Maxwell Perkins
I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.
Maxwell Perkins
Anybody can find out if he is a writer. If he were a writer when he tried to write of some particular day he would find in the effort that he could recall exactly how the light fell and how the temperature felt and all the quality of it. Most people cannot do it. If they can do it they may never be successful in a pecuniary sense but that ability is at the bottom of writing I am sure.
Maxwell Perkins
Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
B. K. Sandwell
There are two kinds of writers - the great ones who can give you truths and the lesser ones who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
Just get it down on paper and then we'll see what to do with it.
Maxwell Perkins
Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.
Edgar Watson Howe
Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Half effort does not produce half results it produces no results. Work continuous work and hard work is the only way to accomplish results that last.
Hamilton Holt
God gives every bird its food but he does not throw it into the nest.
J.G. Holland
As a woman to be competitive is to be passive.
Marianne Partridge
In the sex-war thoughtlessness is a weapon of the male vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion. Yet when every unkind word about women has been said we have still to admit with Byron that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty deceit and revenge is set alight it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.
Cyril Connolly
A woman is as old as she looks before breakfast.
Edgar Watson Howe
The heart is wiser than the intellect.
J.G. Holland
One of the most adventurous things left is to go to bed for no one can lay a hand on our dreams.
E. V. Lucas
What man can imagine he may one day achieve.
Nancy Hale
Keep violence in the mind Where it belongs.
Brian Aldiss
Everybody hates me because I'm so universally liked.
Peter De Vries
Truth for him was a moving target he never aimed for the bull and rarely pierced the outer ring.
Hugh Cudlipp
Many people would be more truthful were it not for their uncontrollable desire to talk.
Edgar Watson Howe
When you travel remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Clifton Fadiman
Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things.
Charles Simmons
The mind grows by what it feeds on.
J.G. Holland
The best preparation for a better life next year is a full complete harmonious joyous life this year.
Thomas Dreier
If we are ever to enjoy life now is the time not tomorrow or next year. ... Today should always be our most wonderful day.
Thomas Dreier
We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.
Fulton Oursler
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.
Peter De Vries
Gluttony is an emotional escape a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries
Farmers worry only during the growing season but town people worry all the time.
Edgar Watson Howe
Success has always been easy to measure. It is the distance between one's origins and one's final achievement.
Michael Korda
Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Half effort does not produce half results. It produces no results. Work continuous work and hard work is the only way to accomplish results that last.
Hamilton Holt
No one can help you in holding a good job except Old Man You.
Edgar Watson Howe
I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure which is-try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope
I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure which is - try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope