Editor Quotations

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot.

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.

Everything must be carried out in extreme sobriety.

I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that I have never made one.

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

It's not that we poor men are so powerful to be able to banish the devil. It's that God gives us the power.

Journalism is in fact history on the run.

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.

An exorcism is tantamount to a miracle - an extraordinary intervention of God.

Its attitude, which it has preached and practiced, is skepticism. Now, it finds, the public is applying that skepticism to the press.

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.

There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton's many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.

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 defied nothing at all. I ignored the law because I didn't know it existed. It didn't occur to me that anyone would want to curb my inspiration.

Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is already two steps from reality.

I was probably being a little cocky, which I do when I feel that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.

Life for me has been exactly what I thought it would be, a cake, which I have eaten and had too.

Anderson's muckraking is one of debatable ends constantly used to justify questionable works.

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.

Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they're lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.

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.

You can have your titular recognition. I'll take money and power.

I have always fought for ideas - until I learned that it isn't ideas but grief, struggle, and flashes of vision which enlighten.

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.

Gail didn't want me commenting on the opinion pages. I was hired by the news department and, despite the rabid assertions of the Times' enemies and detractors, the two really have nothing to do with each other.

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.

The Federal government does not have any information about extraterrestrial life to conceal, and there are no secret projects for me to investigate.

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.

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 greatest enemy is reality. I have fought it successfully for thirty years.

I wouldn't believe him if he said the sun came up in the east.

The really tough thing would have been to decide to take Woodward and Bernstein off the story. They were carrying the coal for us - in that their stories were right.

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.

I was as repelled by the French as I was attracted by their country.

The news is staged, anticipated, reported, analyzed until all interest is wrung from it and abandoned for some new novelty.

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 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.

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.

A pin has as much head as some authors and a good deal more point.

I must be out of it, but I don't know any good journalists who have excused Clinton's problems.

The green-light decision process today consists of maybe of 30 or 40 people.

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 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.

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

It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.

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.

Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others.

There are many men whose tongues might govern multitudes if they could govern their tongues.

We made only one real mistake. And even then we were right.

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!

Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.

We were right about the slush fund. But Sloan did not testify about it to the Grand Jury.

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

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.

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.

Right, but there's expertise and then there's inside information. And I think we have to make a distinction.

Consistency is the paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.

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!

The green-light meeting, when I first started at Paramount, would consist of maybe three or four of us in a room. Perhaps two or three of us would have read the script under discussion.

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.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

It took us about a day and a half to find out what had gone wrong.

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.

Hollywood is going to have to find a way of meeting those profit goals.

I think on civilian casualties they could do more. It's actually something I've discussed with the editors involved. They're aware of it, and I'm hopeful that there will be more reporting on that.

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

They cut about seven minutes from that broadcast, but it was still vital to the story's momentum.

I give Cronkite a whole lot of credit.

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.

One of Brando's problems is that he can't have a conversation with anyone.

If Bill was all id, Hillary is all superego.

I think it's one of the Times' problems that they haven't made it clear to readers what various formats mean.

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.

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?'

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.