Editors Quotes

• Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Rejection, Criticism

  Kurt Vonnegut (1982). “Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage”, Dell Books

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• No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

  H. G. Wells

  Passion, Writing, Editing

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

  T. S. Eliot

  Witty, Humorous, Writing

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• The road to ignorance is paved with good editors.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Writing, Ignorance, Rejection

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• I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.

  Lynn Abbey

  Successful, Editing, Skills

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• How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

  Mark Twain

  Regret, Charity, Magazines

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.7132, Delphi Classics

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• Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

  Samuel Johnson

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  "The Sayings of Doctor Johnson".

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• I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

  Richard Branson

  Success, Business, Writing

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• Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

  Men, Wheat, Separation

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• There won't be editors in the future with the Internet world, with citizen reporting. That doesn't scare me.

  Matt Drudge

  Scare, Citizens, World

  Matt Drudge (2001). “Drudge Manifesto”, N A L Trade

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• An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor.

  Jackie Kennedy

  Mother, Encouragement, Kind

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• Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Funny, Writing

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• The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

  John Y. Campbell

  Home, Writing, Simple

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• Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Business, Writing, Wheat Fields

  The Roycroft Dictionary of Epigrams (1914)

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• I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.

  Kate Chopin

  Giving, Secret, Would Be

  1899 'On Certain Brisk Days', in the St Louis Post -Dispatch, 26 Nov.

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• My only claim to fame, if I have one, is that I'm an editor.

  Woody Herman

  Fame, Claims, Ifs

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• I think editors have to come out of a certain kind of community.

  Bill Joy

  Thinking, Community, Kind

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• It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

  George Plimpton

  Biographies, Pleasure, Reader

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• I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

  Jeffery Deaver

  School, Magazines, Newspapers

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• Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.

  Josephus Daniels

  Crime, Ought, Hung

  Josephus Daniels (1941). “Editor in Politics”

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• You're at the mercy of the editors' hands.

  Kelly LeBrock

  Hands, Mercy

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• Does advertising corrupt editors? Yes it does, but fewer editors than you may suppose... the vast majority of editors are incorruptible.

  David Ogilvy

  Majority, Doe, May

  David Ogilvy (1963). “Confessions of an advertising man”, Holiday House

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• A very good editor is almost a collaborator.

  Ken Follett

  Very Good, Collaborators

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

  T. S. Eliot

  Writing, Editing, Littles

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• I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.

  Tobias Wolff

  Work, People, Trying

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