Being An Editor Quotes & Sayings

Being an editor has been a source of great satisfaction, but writing is the thing I truly love. — Bill Keller

Passion for books is the most important thing in being an editor/translator. Work with love. — Listiana Srisanti

I like being an editor, and I know how to make a magazine. — Roberto Civita

Being an editor doesn't make you a better writer - or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer. — Joseph Kanon

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. — Michael Sheen

I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have. — Toni Morrison

It's possible for an editor to break down a dream, if you like, into its components and being able to shoot the wide shots in sunshine, when the weather was at its best and you know, we would get sort of almost a 3D effect sometimes if you chose the right time of day to shoot the thing. — John Glen

You're right,' said the corporal. 'It serves editors like that right. They only stir the people up. Last year when I was still only a lance-corporal I had an editor under me and he called me nothing else but a disaster for the army, but when I taught him unarmed drill and he sweated, he always used to say: "Please respect the human being in me." But I gave him hell for his human being when the order was "flat down" and there were a lot of puddles in the barracks courtyard.
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As I said, he was always on about his "human being" and nothing else. Once when he was reflecting over a puddle in which he had to plop down when he did his "flat down" I said to him: "When you're always talking about a human being even when you're in the mud remember that man was created out of the dust of the ground and it must have been O.K. for him. — Jaroslav Hasek

I don't mind being identified as any character as long as I'm doing a good job as an actor. I have done all kinds of roles - from an editor, judge, police officer, murderer to a corrupt businessman. — Boman Irani

I used to be really fat, but now I'm not. I used to have hair, but now I don't. I used to be able to see without corrective lenses, but now I can't. One of these this is exacerbated by the fact that I'm an editor. One of these things is true despite the fact that I'm an editor. One of them has nothing to do with me being an editor. — John Joseph Adams

There's a way of thinking that comes with being an editor that is incredibly useful on the set. It's not just a vocabulary thing or a right-to-left thing or script supervisor stuff. It's a way of thinking about the film and the shots and the way they fit together, what you need and what you don't need, and what you can get away with if you have to. — Joe Dante

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. — Peter Sis

The information highway is being sold to us as delivering information, but what it's really delivering is data ... Unlike data, information has utility, timeliness, accuracy, a pedigree ... Editors serve as barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent saying no. — Clifford Stoll

I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike. — Stephen King

The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it. — Terri Windling

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life ... Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn't. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn't write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That's why I didn't study literature — Haruki Murakami

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. — John Glen

There was an old joke about being left on a deserted island with an editor. You are starving. All you have left is a glass of orange juice. Days pass. You are near death. You are about to drink the juice when the editor grabs the glass from your hand and pees into it. You look at him, stunned . "There," the editor says, handing you the glass. "It just needed a little tweaking. — Harlan Coben

I think that being an editor, someone who works with words, is very good training for being a translator because it trains you to be attentive to words in a very specific, very concrete, very literal way. — Ann Goldstein

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it. — Ralph Fiennes

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going. — Richard Branson

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director. — Michael Tilson Thomas

of experience at the Privy Council Office who was hired to be an editor of the French translation but ended up being a primary editor of the entire report. I headed — Kevin Page

I was interested in creating things that I could be proud of and so, you know, I was interested in being an editor of a magazine, things that I could be proud of, and so, you know, I was interested in being an editor of a magazine, but in order to be an editor of a magazine I had to become a publisher as well. I had to pay the bills. I had to worry about the printing and the paper manufacturing and the distribution of that magazine. — Richard Branson

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States memorably stated in a letter in 1807: 'nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle...Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the first, Truths; second, Probabilities; the third, Possibilities; the fourth, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.' If that was true as far back as 1807 when the technologies supporting the mass media were markedly less advanced - how much more true it is today. The — Jason Carter

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. — Stieg Larsson

This sound self-serving, but being interested in everything makes you a more effective opportunist - and that's what an editor has to be, a student of unintended consequences. — Terry McDonell

Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing. — Karen Thompson Walker

Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out! was there, too. In a few years' time he would castigate me publicly in his magazine for turning my back on the folk community. It was an angry letter. I liked Irwin, but I couldn't relate to it. Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew, a piece of music that didn't follow the rules of modern jazz, which had been on the verge of breaking into the popular marketplace, until Miles's record came along and killed its chances. Miles was put down by the jazz community. I couldn't imagine Miles being too upset. — Bob Dylan

Well I've made no secret of my life long love of MAD Magazine, it's probably my first and greatest influence in terms of my comic sensibilities. I've known John [Ficarra] for many years, and we've been friends. About four or five months ago, at a dinner in New York, John made the very nice offer of my being guest editor for an issue of MAD and I thought about it for about half a nanosecond and decided that was a pretty good idea. — Al Yankovic

There are similarities between being an editor and a tailor. Tailors have a vast supply of fabrics, buttons and thread at their disposal and put it together to make a whole. That's what an editor does - looks at society at a given time and pulls together the interesting aspects into a single issue each month. — Graydon Carter

I'd gotten myself into a kind of journalism that wasn't really compatible with rearing an infant. I'd been a foreign correspondent for a long time and had this subspecialty in covering catastrophes. It had spoiled me a little because you have a tremendous amount of autonomy, and I couldn't really see being an editor in an office. — Geraldine Brooks

Part of the discipline of being an editor is that you have to be a good audience member; your work is to be a surrogate audience member on the films you are working on. — Jay Cassidy

And The San Francisco Chronicle launched "an off-site startup-style incubator. " As Audrey Cooper, the managing editor, explained, "We hope to eventually get to the point where instead of being a newspaper company that produces websites, we think of ourselves as a digital company that also produces a newspaper. Unless you flip that switch, I don't think any newspaper will be truly successful at negotiating the digital switchover. — Anonymous

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. — Peter Davison

I first got into writing because I got involved in the production of a magazine for army wives. They were short of copy one day and the editor asked me to write a piece about being an army wife "and make it funny". Good at obeying orders I did as I was told, the piece was a success, I was asked to write a regular piece and slowly it ended up as a book. — Catherine Jones