Quotes by Editors - Page 23

A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
George Jean Nathan
Replace your old books with the books you’ve always wanted to write.
Rob Bignell
Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
Rob Bignell
Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.
Rob Bignell
Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.
Rob Bignell
By writing, we partake in something greater than ourselves. Pick up pen and paper or take a seat at your computer today and create something of beauty.
Rob Bignell
...writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand.
Rob Bignell
My ideas are a shapeless mass that my writing molds into beauty.
Rob Bignell
Never be afraid to write what you believe. If the message speaks the truth, others will fear your words for you.
Rob Bignell
Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book.
Rob Bignell
When we sit down to write, we psychically enter a sanctuary. This safe haven is our own personal space where we can say whatever is on our mind, where we can talk about what matters most to us, where we can imagine the kind of world that we would like to live.
Rob Bignell
..here's the editor's prescription, writer: 1000 words daily until next checkup.
Rob Bignell
When I reach for my pen, nothing is out of reach.
Rob Bignell
Replace your old books with the book you've always wanted to write.
Rob Bignell
Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.
William Zinsser
Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
William Zinsser
...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and hard-bitten detectives and sleepy lagoons. This is adjective-by-habit - a habit you should get rid of. Not every oak has to be gnarled. The adjective exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
William Zinsser
Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.
William Zinsser
I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the day's work--and not with some enjoyment.
William Zinsser
The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.
William Zinsser
The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best.
William Zinsser
People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments
Manjula Martin
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author. It's a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.
William Zinsser
You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.
Robert J. Randisi
Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.
Alberto Manguel
These cords that God makes, Reverend Bauxite thought, we stand holding one end while they run taut into the darkness.
Brian Francis Slattery
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
Frank Herbert
The Cruellest things do not hide in the dark.
Kirsty Logan
Darkness promotes speech.
Alberto Manguel
‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.
Mary Ann Shaffer
But you want to know about the influence of books on my life, and as I’ve said, there was only one. Seneca. Do you know who he was? He was a Roman philosopher who wrote letters to imaginary friendstelling them how to behave for the rest of their lives.. Maybe that sounds dull, but the letters aren’t – they’re witty. I think you learn more if you’re laughing at the same time.
Mary Ann Shaffer
And his father has the gall to think I’d seduce a kid who uses Clearasil instead of aftershave!
Elaine Raco Chase
But if we do not dream, then I think perhaps we are misusing our heads. They are not on our shoulders only to be farms for hair.
Brian Doyle
My second meeting with Vincent Starrett began on a cool Sunday afternoon in May of 1962. After a short interlude, he returned from the kitchen precariously balancing a large cup of tea on a very small saucer. It was the largest tea cup I had ever seen, large enough to startle, I am inclined to suspect, even the Mad Hatter in 'Alice in Wonderland.
Peter Ruber
Machines can't lie," I said, lying through my circuits.
Adam Christopher
Ish #1 "It's not your mama's macaroni and cheese if you used spaghetti noodles.
Regina Griffin
Ish #109 "If MapQuest says make a right, go straight. You'll get there quicker.
Regina Griffin
Ish #19 "If your diet soda has zero calories, zero sugar and zero fat, what the hell are you drinking?
Regina Griffin
Ish #153 "Artificial plants grow best in artificial light.
Regina Griffin
Kiss my ass Rath Roiben Rye
Holly Black
If you truly must obey your mistress. If you truly must have revenge, then you can start with me. But if you choose to follow your own path, well you can start that with me too if you like.
Steve Hockensmith
This is what they mean by epiphanies. I am almost thinking in exclamation points.
Claire Hennessy
So why are you so mad at me for kissing you?”“Because you took too long. If you'd done that, say, three years ago, we wouldn't have only had one kiss before we both get horribly mutilated.
Rusty Fischer
A scar isn't about the injury, it's about the healing.
Daniel José Older
You know you're having a bad week when you call 911, the paramedics come to your house, and one of them notices you've rearranged your furniture.
Cherie Kephart
There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
IF YOU WALK THROUGH THE FIRE I’LL COME TO THEE. As Bob walked past he wondered how many gods that piece of advice might apply to.
Adam Christopher
Baby," she says in a harsh whisper, "in this world, lots of people will try to grind you down. They need you to be small so they can be big. You let them think whatever they want, but you make sure you get yours. You get yours.
Holly Black
Unforgiveness is a shadow of the past; it is behind you, but you always know it is there. Sorrow and bitterness covers your heart like the darkness covers the night.
Deborah Brodie
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
Cliff Fadiman
The fig tree grows its flowers strangely inside out, concealed within the soft interior of the fruit. Erszébet imagines the fig's hidden fairy weight of seeds, grown in sweetness that is also a darkness. Like treasure in a cave.
Jody Shields
Disembodied spirits,” said his partner, “are not known to use telephones. Neither are spooks, phantoms, or werewolves.” “That was in the old days. Why shouldn’t they change with the times and be modern, too?
Robert Arthur
he night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.
Hazel Butler
The night beyond the window was still, mordant white snow, punctuated only by the eerie dark of the trees, gumshoeing their way along the edge of the path outside. Their skeletal fingers clawed up at the stars, held down by an insidious, weightless lacing of snowflakes. I gazed idly at the moon and wondered if it truly had the power to sway the will of men.
Hazel Butler
Mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches. So what does all this mean practically? It means that congregations must be conscious of the persistent and ineradicable loneliness that makes a person seek communion, with other people and with God, in the first place. It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling shit. It means that liberal churches that go months without mentioning the name of Jesus, much less the dying Christ, have no more spiritual purpose or significance than a local union hall. It means that we -- those of us who call ourselves Christians -- need a revolution in the way we worship. This could mean many different things -- poetry as liturgy, focused and extended silences, learning from other religious traditions and rituals (this seems crucial), incorporating apophatic language. But one thing it means for sure: we must be conscious of language as language, must call into question every word we use until we refine or remake a language that is fit for our particular religious doubts and despairs -- and of course (and most of all!) our joys.
Christian Wiman
You should not have to burn your hand every day to feel the mystery of fire.
Steve Abbott
The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.
Philip Zaleski
Even Asmodeus, that limping devil who looked through rooftops at men's most secret actions, could not have told which of these thoughts masked an undercurrent of joy -- the joy of the man who know that he has killed wisely and well.
Anthony Boucher
..it sounded very good and very false at the same time, so that you had the feeling that even if was true, he was touching only on the very highest points and maybe embellishing those a little.
Bill Pronzini