Editor Quotations

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.

Of, course it always cheers a news editor when a story has what we describe as 'legs' therefore it, erm, runs.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer's daily routine, unless you're Dominick Dunne, isn't exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.

When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word 'prose,' or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

I'm not sure how writers and artists of other graphic novels join forces, but this is how the process worked for me: First, I produced my final script. Then, Mark Siegel, my editor at First Second, assembled information about 10 or 12 different artists and had me look through their portfolios to see what kind of styles appealed to me.

My training as a journalist was invaluable: when I worked on 'The Daily Express,' the editor would often ask for 1000 words within a couple of hours. I could not say I was not inspired. I had to get on with it.

I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.

I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy - although we're not calling it that.

My first novel, 'Housekeeping,' was accepted by the first agent who read it, and bought by the first editor who read it. In general, my experience with publication has been gentle and gratifying.

I rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.

Screen is satisfying because it's so technical and mysterious. It's like playing roulette: you get a script, you think it's either great or naff, but you have no idea how it will really turn out. On stage, you are your own editor - and you get brief moments of grace, where suddenly you feel free.

As a senior editor at Tor Books and the manager of our science fiction and fantasy line, I rarely blog to promote specific projects I'm involved with, for reasons that probably don't need a lot of explanation.

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.

This is a man who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in three years, editor of the Harvard Law Review, argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court.

Michel duCille has been an editor of indelible integrity, decency, and a deep sense of humanity. Michel stood by me during the highlights and shadows of my life. We began our careers together as interns at 'The Miami Herald.' His photography over the years embodied the concerned journalist, which carried over to his work in management.

I believe every editor should stand to edit. That's just my particular soapbox. Some things are so delicate and depend on such fine, delicate work. One frame in one direction or another can make such a difference and it is, in that, like brain surgery.

With Digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

I had this vague notion that one day I might be editor of 'Vogue China.' It was a bizarre ambition, as I didn't speak a word of Chinese. There were flaws in my plan, admittedly.

I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.

I was a film editor for eight years before I made my first feature, 'Dog Soldiers.' I am from Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England.

I've followed Brenda Bowen as she's moved from Henry Holt to Scholastic to Simon and Schuster to Hyperion and to HarperCollins. I have complete confidence that Brenda always knows the right questions to ask. I'm not sure another editor would be able to do that.

My toughest criticism usually comes from myself. As my editor can attest to, I'm never done tweaking a book until the production department has to rip it from my hands!

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

I was a good student - a geek, really - editor of the school paper, thought I was going to go to university.

I didn't understand in the beginning that the editor didn't want me to know the author. I'd make an effort to meet the author, but it would end up being a disaster because then I had the author telling me what I should be doing.

I'm working on a bunch of things with my daughter Emily. In some ways, she's a smarter and better editor than I am.

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.

In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people!

I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to 'Vogue,' and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don't have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop.

I just fell into the job as a fashion editor at a teen magazine. I was there for two years, and I left there as a senior fashion editor at the age of 25.

I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.

Every drama requires a cast. The cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina,' that the author or editor provides a list of characters to keep them straight. Or it may be an intimate cast of two.

Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.

After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press.

The way I found time to write 'The Imperfectionists' was that I took work as a copy editor at the 'International Herald Tribune' in Paris, working full-time for approximately six months, then taking my savings from that and writing full-time, then returning after six months, and so on, until the book was done!

My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.

But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

By the time I came to the States, I really understood how a magazine works. I came to 'Vogue' as creative director, and three years later I went back to London to be editor in chief of British 'Vogue.'

The one thing that's always been the center of my political thinking - and it goes back to when I was 19 and editor of my college paper - is an abhorrence of the extreme.

As my blog editor knows all too well, I wasn't all that keen to enter the blogosphere world.

You can go up to the editor of 'Vogue,' and she might think I have horrible style, or maybe she thinks I have great style. Who knows? I don't really know too much about it: I just know what I like and what I don't like. I love clothes and making my own clothes and shoes, like I got to do with Adidas.

I couldn't follow the events of September 11 because I was proofreading a novel I'd just completed - on Islam and its quarrel with the West - that I'd promised, six months earlier, to deliver to my editor on September 12, 2001.

The ouster of Jill Abramson as executive editor of 'The New York Times' sent shock waves through the media landscape. Reports that she was fired thanks in part to a soured relationship based on the 'Times' alleged sexist pay discrepancy only made those shock waves stronger.

I'm crazy lucky. I was trying to be a filmmaker. I was doing Second City classes as a way to be creative. I was a PA for a long time. I was working as an assistant editor on 'Iron Chef America' when I got 'SNL.' It was one of those situations where you're concentrating in one thing and the peripheral thing popped.

In a play, you dictate pace, you dictate rhythm, you dictate when people look at you, when people should be looking at something else. In film, the editor does that.

I was a production assistant in the post department on 'The Surreal Life.' And it's been reported before that I was an assistant editor on 'The Surreal Life.' That is not true.

When I was in college, I wanted to be editor of 'Reason' when I grew up. It was an impractical ambition, especially since the magazine was located in Santa Barbara, way off any journalist's normal career path.

We reject the idea of rejection. We don't have some grizzled editor deciding who or what is worthy of publication. Lulu lets anyone publish their work -- and the world decides on its merits.

Luckily, I'm not a stand-up comedian, so I don't get the fear of standing on stage in front of a dead audience: my humorous pieces have to make it past an editor before they get exposed to the public.

LUMINARY, n. One who throws light upon a subject; as an editor by not writing about it.

So I was the associate editor of a medical journal in Chicago, and I was thirty seven, and all of a sudden I just sort of started going through this dark night of the soul... where I just... . Is this going to be it for me, am I going to be spending the rest of my life writing about cataracts and hemorrhoids... and... . just not what I wanted to do, and I was just intensely depressed all the time.

Obviously, you know, I am known as an action director, and being a film editor previously had been a great advantage for me as an action director.

My editor and I had a theory that if the movie engages their attention, they won't mind sitting there for three hours - which I find true myself.

My editor and I are in a polite argument over that, ... It can be 'Bubbles for Buckfish' for all I know.

My father was this huge, influential intellectual in the '60s and '70s. He was one of the main players in the cultural discussion in Sweden, the editor of papers.

News is becoming more of a conversation. You can express opinions online in real time. You don't send a letter to the editor and wait a week.

Peter Utley, the newspaper's obituary editor cheerfully checked with Primrose Palmer, his assistant, on the day's soul traffic. The late archbishop from New Zealand sounded promising, it was agreed, but then again it was lunch time, and who knew what had been happening in some now-ending life.

Nearly 96 hours after the Observer had reported it, I called Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale and asked why not. 'We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting,' Smale replied. She added that 'we could get no confirmation or comment.' In other words, U.S. intelligence officials refused to confirm or discuss the memo -- so the Times did not see fit to report on it.

On 'Senna,' it got to the point where there was so much footage that our first editor had the wild suggestion that we only use the archive.

I was immediately fascinated, ... How did this child grow up and survive? The article mentioned that this was then done to other children -? this was a precedent-setting case. I was reaching for the phone when my editor called and said, 'Can you try and find this person?'

I was the editor of the 'News of the World;' I was the editor of the 'Sun' and chief executive.

I got the notebook and got the list of RFCs. That's how I got to be RFC editor - by keeping the list of who is writing which one.

I didn't want to be ungrateful or picky, but I only applied to places I would want to end up living at. So I e-mailed the chief copy editor and he wrote me back right away - 'Congratulations on the program, thanks for the e-mail, we will give you $500 a week ...' He was totally cool about it." ()

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.

I basically shoot the movie the way I think it should be cut, so my directives to the editor are in the camera.

I am thrilled to become international 'Vogue' editor at Conde Nast International, which has a real commitment to journalistic excellence, and to have the opportunity to write for a wider global audience through the 'Vogue' websites.

I have a terrific, marvellous, unbelievably helpful editor in London and she has the biggest influence, but even so we disagree as much as we agree.

From 1999 through 2001, I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called 'Brill's Content' that eventually merged with a now-defunct website about the media industry called Inside.com.

From what I have read in letters to the editor is that someone else has created a food supply There was a habitat and food supply and they got established. My sympathy goes out to those who have do deal with it, but all you can do is deal with it.

I don't say no as much as I should. I'm an extreme workaholic. So I can be sick, and I still say yes to anything. When you are the CEO of your own company, editor of your own videos, your own writer ,and you do every role yourself, you have a hard time saying no to opportunities.

I always swore I would never write a book. But I read Clare Balding's and it was really interesting and so prettily written and lovely and not too revealing. I went to her book launch and met her editor who said 'why don't you think about it? You can do it however you want, based on your characters or you.'

He's always loved being a newspaper editor and writer and publisher.

He did not draw me into the movement, but he was in it from the start. He and I had met at my twenty-second birthday party, in 1945. So we knew each other for a long, long time. And although Martin, a few years later, became very active and became the first editor of ONE Magazine, he didn't draw me in.

He is the owner and editor of (a prominent) investment magazine, ... Staying in the race would not be a good investment.

I think about the question of perspective in reporting all the time, and since I spent 20 years of my career in Washington as both a reporter and an editor I'm keenly aware that a newspaper should not be dominated by stories in which the only voices and perspective come from those in power.

It generally takes me about nine months from the point the book is conceived to the point my editor sends it off to be typeset.

I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.

I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'

I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.

I won't be running my posts past any editor before they appear. I will continue to write simply what I believe or think, however misguided I may be. I will continue to correct any errors in the full light of day and change my mind if new events demand it or new facts compel it. I think we're going to see a pronounced shift towards the brand of the writer. Media outlets may find themselves in the position of football clubs, forced to pay higher and higher premiums if they want to keep their stars.

I think one of the best jobs in the universe must be being the editor of 'The New Yorker', but there are a number of magazines that I'd be excited to be the editor of. They would be 'Wired', 'The New Yorker' and probably, 'Vogue'.

Johnny Quads is at the top of his field as a writer, editor and a player. His hiring means we are raising the stakes in the world of poker publishing.

Melissa Biggs Bradley spent a decade as Travel Editor of 'Town & Country,' and later served as the founding editor of 'Town & Country Travel.' She then launched Indagare Souk, an online marketplace of global treasures.

(Wentz) just gives me lyrics and phrases and sentences and ideas that are just kind of disembodies from any song, ... I'm his word editor and he's my music editor.

We are pleased and excited to welcome Vince as part of the team. His extensive experience as a respected editor in the field combined with his expertise in communications technologies makes Vince a strong addition to our research organization. Vince will play an integral role in further deepening our depth of research knowledge.

When I was editor (of the paper) we disagreed violently about certain things but he never interfered with editorial matters.

When my editor sent me the first two images of Joker's daughter, I was struck by how confident she looked despite her boney appearance and horribly scarred face. So I starting thinking, how did Duela gain such confidence in a world that prizes beauty?

Both the choice of a cover and the execution of a cover are crucial for any magazine. Every editor wants their cover to stand out.

This was great reporting. I think the public should know that great reporting starts with a publisher who has guts and an editor who has guts. And the role of the late Katherine Graham, who owned The Washington Post, is not to be underestimated.

When it gets to this point that staff members are so unhappy that they want an editor suspended, it is a reflection of some problems within the staff that probably go beyond the particular incident that prompted it.

As the music editor for High Times, I found that the musicians wanted to do something for the cause, ... So I took them up on their offer. I suggested they do a album like this or commit to a benefit concert. I sort of tapped a vein that hadn't been tapped before.

An editor is an accomplice, looking in from the outside. That objective view is essential. We don't write in a vacuum, and we don't publish in a vacuum.

During the past year, he'd pressed Woodward to tell him the name, arguing that the current editor should know the identity of our source. Woodward had resisted.