Editor Quotes

An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You need editors, not brand managers,who will push the envelope to make [a brand media property] go forward.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

T.S Eliot

But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately.

A good editor can make a respectable writer remarkable, just like a good parent helps a child become amazing.

An editor sleeping with his writer was not as bad as a psychoanalyst sleeping with his patient, or even a professor sleeping with an undergraduate, let alone a president with an intern.

Edward St. Aubyn

Some mediocre ladies in influential positions are usually embarrassed by an unusual book and so prefer the old familiar stuff which doesn't embarrass them and also doesn't give the child one slight inkling of beauty and reality. This is most discouraging to a creative writer, like you, and also to a hardworking and devoted editor like me. I love most of my editor colleagues but I must confess that I get a little depressed and sad when some of their neat little items about a little girl in old Newburyport during the War of 1812 gets [sic] adopted by a Reading Circle.

Leonard S. Marcus

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

William Zinsser

See my blog at crossedeyesanddottedtees.wordpress.com for more of my writing.

I have an idea for a new book. It's a novel about a beautiful yet sensitive author whose spirit is crushed by her domineering editor. Do you like it?

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the way I paint I'm going to need to contact an editor. Even if I were to abstractly paint the phrase "I love you," it would be the visual equivalent of Joyce's Ulysses.-James Lee Schmidt and Jarod Kintz

James Lee Schmidt

I’m a little bit of a plot junkie. I like stakes in my books. Sometimes storytelling gets a bit of a bad rap. “Plot’s easy” or “there’s a higher art we are all aspiring to.” Yes, first and foremost we are all aspiring to that art but I also think it has to have a certain propulsiveness, a certain thing that’s keeping me turning the pages. No matter how great the voice is you will have problems in the plot that will enable somebody to put it down. There are too many things competing for everyone’s attention to allow anyone to put that book down. I don’t want the reviewer to put it down because they’ve got 50 galleys stacked up. I don’t want the reader to put it down.

Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

I wonder what became of you, your JohnnyRotten skin, no Emerald City eyes.You'd have been a beauty if you let inferiority steam your glasses with its candor, sans laughter.

Kristen Henderson

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T.S Eliot

What, Rudolph wasn’t available?