Editors Quotes - Page 28

• It's because you have no power. You give them all the material and the cinematographer, the director, the editor, boy what they can choose... You better hope they like you because they can slice and dice and make you look like a damn fool when your face and body are up there on a 30-foot screen.

  William Mapother

  Boys, Feet, Giving

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

  Michael Moorcock

  Years, Attention, Fiction

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• Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

  Ray Bradbury

  Song, Book, Reading

  Ray Bradbury (2012). “Fahrenheit 451: A Novel”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

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• After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

  Ashwin Sanghi

  Writing, Suggestions, Novel

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• Journalists don't have audiences, they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.

  Howard Rheingold

  Letters, Deals, Journalist

  "Howard Rheingold: Knowing How to Collaborate Is Essential". Interview with Roland Legrand, mediashift.org. March 12, 2012.

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• A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.

  Ronald Reagan

  Morning, Jobs, Real

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• Public opinion is the pennant on a nation's mast which shows the politician and the editor how to trim the sails.

  Austin O'Malley

  Public Opinion, Politician, Sail

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• Uninvited criticism is insult.

  John L'Heureux

  Criticism, Insult, Critics

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• The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don't.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Artist, Criticism

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• I really think that if there's any one enemy to human creativity, especially creative writing, its self-consciousness. And if you have one eye on the mirror to see how you're doing, you're not doing it as well as you can. Don't think about publishing, don't think about editors, don't think about marketplace.

  Andre Dubus

  Writing, Creativity, Eye

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• If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Writing, People, Half

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.169, Simon and Schuster

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• For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

  Laura Miller

  Writing, Agents, Sometimes

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• I had published a co-edited book with Oxford a decade ago, my first book actually. Years later I found myself having lunch with Lori Stone, who was an editor at Oxford at that time. We connected at a conference and over the course of lunch she told me about a wonderful new series she had just developed called Understanding Research.

  Patricia Leavy

  Book, Oxford, Lunch

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• In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

  Mark Waid

  Running, Book, Long

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• My guess is that the editor [Cincinnati Post] wanted his own Jeff MacNelly (a Pulitzer winner at 24), and I didn't live up to his expectations. My Cincinnati days were pretty Kafkaesque.

  Bill Watterson

  Expectations, Winner, Wanted

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• I have SO many books I didn't sell. Some my agent rejected outright, others made it all the way to my editor to be turned away. Not everything is a winner, which is tough when you've devoted eight or nine months of your life to something.

  Sarah Dessen

  Book, Eight, Nine

  Interview with Claire Zulkey, www.wbez.org. January 13, 2012.

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• I have a secret goal with my editor - he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Reading, Phones, Goal

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

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• Well digital media and social media are eliminating the middle man - in the old days, you had to go through the editors. Or the television producer, you know? Now you have people talking directly to each other, globally who have never met. I think you put the "word" in "word of mouth."

  Kelly Cutrone

  Men, Thinking, Talking

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• You have to be very careful to view yourself with a somewhat skeptical eye and to remember that you're not here taking down everything I'm saying because you think I'm such a marvelous fellow but because your editors say go get 1,200 words or whatever on Chuck Heston.

  Charlton Heston

  Eye, Thinking, Views

  Interview with Bill Kauffman, reason.com. April 1, 1987.

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• It took me three, four years, to get from my first film to my second film, banging on doors, trying to get people to give me a chance. Writing, struggling, with no money in the bank, working as an editor on the side. Working as a cameraman on the side. Getting little jobs, eking out a living. Trying to stay alive, and pushing a script that nobody wanted.

  George Lucas

  Jobs, Struggle, Writing

  "Cinematic Phenomenon". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 19, 1999.

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• But we have yet to make peace basic to our education. The most important subject in the world is hardly taught at all. In the spirit of this passage, the editor has taken the liberty of editing Mr. Cousins' language to make it more gender inclusive.

  Norman Cousins

  Peace, Cousin, Taken

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• I think I became a better writer after I started writing for the New Yorker. Well, I know I did. And part of it was having my New Yorker editor and part of it is that was when I started really going on tour and reading things in front of an audience 30 times and then going back in the room and rewriting it and reading it and rewriting it. So you really get the rhythm of the sentences down and you really get the flow down and you get rid of stuff that's not important.

  David Sedaris

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.usatoday.com

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• An editor is like a painter. There is a magic in that.

  Sam Rockwell

  Magic, Painter

  "Seven Psychopaths Q&A: 10 Minutes in Heaven With Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell". Interview with Andy Greenwald, grantland.com. October 11, 2012.

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• Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

  James Thurber

  Writing, Editing, Style

  James Thurber (1990). “Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself”

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• I'm a fierce editor! I don't edit out things that I began by saying, usually. The editing is on the micro level - a comma here, a word there.

  Lydia Davis

  Editing, Levels, Fierce

  "Live Chat with Lydia Davis". www.newyorker.com. December 16, 2009.

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