Top 353 Editor Quotes

Having anything to do with a hit film is great. Even if you’re a third assistant to the director or second to the editor, if the film does well, every technician, every actor benefits from it.

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.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

There was a part of me that always wanted to be an editor.

I wrote a query letter to an editor – a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I’ve never looked back.

My editor, Robin Robertson, is one of this country’s finest poets, so I listen to him when he offers advice.

In the mid-2000s, I kind of accidentally became a music editor.

I didn’t do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

The smartest thing a filmmaker can do is to become a good editor.

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

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.

I think one of the interesting things is that vi is really a mode-based editor.

My wonderful editor, Jackie Onassis, asked me to write a book that I wanted to write. I said, ‘Look, it’s not going to be scandalized. I’m not going to talk about anybody like a dog. I’m going to say the positiveness of my life, and talk about those who have contributed to the way I’ve been going, and that’s that.’

After more than a decade as the editor of ‘Wired’ magazine, Chris Anderson started the company of his dreams – a robotics manufacturing company called 3D Robotics – to produce the autonomous flying vehicles coming out of DIY Drones.

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

I invented animals and birds – I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you’re supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor.

I stayed at ‘Cosmo’ well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large – editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal’s memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself.

The life of an editor may seem all glam all the time, but there’s nothing like schlepping through the city during a torrential downpour to put things in perspective.

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 don’t want to be an editor – I want to be really forward about that. I would be a horrible editor.

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.

When I went in, my editor said, ‘I hope you don’t think you’re a writer.’ And I said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m a journalist.’ And, uh, turned out we were both right.

In some Old Testament books, it’s very evident that an editor has been at work. That’s quite all right. It’s part of the process.

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.

For 10 years, I’d been working as a freelance writer and editor, making money but not a living. It was a good arrangement family-wise, allowing me to stay home with our daughter, but not so great financially or, sometimes, ego-wise.

I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.

I hadn’t ever worked with an ‘editor’ until I was 26 – although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.

Before MS moved in on me, I’d worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a literary magazine, and before the age of 20, I’d also worked as a cadet journalist and as an assistant director in both film and TV. And then, after the lesions of MS, both on my spine and in my brain, I was the opposite of bionic.

My editor picked out the name she wanted. I was either going to be Kim Harrison or Lisa Harrison, because she wanted me shelved right next to Hamilton.

Speak to any editor and ask them what they turned down, and they’ll have long lists of books.

After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, ‘It’s been Normanized.’

Two opposite and instructive figures in U.S. journalism during the Trump years are Gerard Baker, editor of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Baron, editor of the Washington Post.

If you had asked me growing up what a stylist does or what a magazine editor does, I would have had no clue – how do you research something like that when you are a first-born child of an immigrant who only grew up knowing doctor, engineer, and lawyer as careers?

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy – the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author – is unique in my experience.

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’.

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 am a young adult author, and so are quite a few of my friends. We all write books for the same demographic; many of us are even published by the same publishing house. Two of us, in fact, share the same editor.

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.

Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It’s a skill every writer has to acquire.

The great thing about stage is that you have more control. The stage is yours. The time is yours. Film is really the editor’s medium.

A mentor, a ‘teacher,’ is like an editor. I absolutely value my editor, who is my teacher.

I’ve always been a writer, and in high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and I got a writing scholarship. It’s always been a passion of mine.

The best compliment came from Knopf’s Sonny Mehta. We were at lunch in New York with my editor, Gary Fisketjon, it was my first time meeting Sonny, and after ordering our food, he turned to me and said, ‘Adam, I read ‘Mr. Peanut’ in two days; every page surprised me, and that, I can assure you, doesn’t happen often.’

I was only 24 years old when a lady called Sabina Sehgal Saikia – the then ‘Delhi Times’ editor – asked me to host the ‘Times Food Guide Awards,’ so it was with The ‘Times of India’ that my career began in this field.

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!

Ask your agent to set up a meeting with either your editor or the marketing department of the house or both so you can find out what they’re doing, what they aren’t, and what you can do to help.

I think I’m becoming more relaxed in front of a camera. I suppose I’ll always feel slightly more at home on stage. It’s more of an actor’s medium. You are your own editor, nobody else is choosing what is being seen of you.

While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area.

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

As a former music magazine editor, I still pine for the days when I used to know about all the best jams and new bands.

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