Confucius
Philosopher
"If you chase two rabbits, you catch none."
Editors quotes
Editors
660 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Kurt Vonnegut
Novelist, Satirist
"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."
Lynn Abbey
Author
"I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre."
Mark Twain
Writer, Humorist
"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."
Donald Murray
Author, Educator
"Don't market yourself. Editors and readers don't know what they want until they see it. Scratch what itches. Write what you need to write, feed the hunger for meaning in your life. Play at the serious questions of life and death."
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Editors quotes (page 1 of 33)
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"Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!"
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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."
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"If you enjoy reading, writing, learning, and sharing what you have learned, don't hesitate to look for a life where you can continue to do those things. It could be as a scientist, an educator, an editor, a journalist, the founder of an organization. You only live once, and it is a tragedy if you deny yourself these options without trying to pursue them."
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"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping."
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"The road to ignorance is paved with good editors."
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"The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal."
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"I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors."
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"The Bush administration works closely with a network of rapid response digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for 'undermining support for our troops.'"
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"With the possible exception of God during the writing of the Bible, every writer in history has needed an editor. So do you."
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"Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry."
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"You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it."
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"Critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes."
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"An Editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an Editor."
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"I don't believe in doing thousands of cuts, then giving it to the editor to make the movie. 'Dump-truck directing' is my reference to that style of moviemaking. You have to know how to cut before you can shoot well. The lack of definition in movies today is appalling. Very few people know how to mount a narrative anymore. If a scene works in one cut, you don't need 10. Or it might need 10. Let's not make it 20."
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"If you are attacked as regards your style, never reply; it is for your work alone to make answer."
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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?'"
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"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea."
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"The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer."
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"I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, "There's no masturbation in the DC Universe." To which my reaction was, "Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.""
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"The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all."
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