Quotes & Sayings About Copy Editors

Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into underwear guys writing blogs from their den. — George Vecsey

People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print. — Jennifer Lee

The copy editors drank cheap beer and seemed kind of bitter. About everything. But Lincoln felt at home with them. They all read too much, and watched too much TV, and argued about movies like they were things that had actually happened. — Rainbow Rowell

I think editors are excellent marketers. They know their audience and produce copy to appeal to them - they just don't call it marketing. — David Robinson

He glances at the sorry trio of copy editors before him: Dave Belling, a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline; Ed Rance, who wears a white ponytail
what more need one say?; and Ruby Zaga, who is sure that the entire staff is plotting against her, and is correct. What is the value in remonstrating with such a feckless triumvirate? — Tom Rachman

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night. — Michael Ignatieff

I come out of journalism, and then book writing. There, it's just you and your editor and maybe a copy desk, looking over your editor's shoulder, and that's the story. It's right there. I can show it to you because it's on paper. — Wendell Pierce

Machines aren't replacing proofreaders at all. Copy editors, who proofread and much, much more, use spellcheck as a tool but read every word that appears in the paper. — Bill Walsh

So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them. — Neil Gaiman

Being in New York, a lot of people I knew were top-notch copy editors or photo retouchers, so I had a good community around me that knew how to do the specialized stuff. — Ian Christe

Great poets are great copy editors. — Dejan Stojanovic

My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters. — Lincoln Child

There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful. — Theodore White

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens. — Mary Norris

You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so ... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out. — Stephen King

The credibility of the work depends on copy editors. I would argue with the copy desk, but I would thank them more. — Bill Kovach

Lincoln worked Christmas Eve, then went out for dinner with a bunch of the copy editors. There was a casino across the river with a twenty-four-hour buffet. "With crab legs tonight," Chuck said, "on account of Christ's birth. — Rainbow Rowell

The BBC is very much in thrall to all this techno cross-fertilisation, in much the same way that print journalists are now encouraged to blog. To the point where there is an emerging breed of sub-editors who take perfectly well-written and punctuated original copy and rewrite it so that it resembles a text message written by a 14-year-old under the influence of Bacardi Breezers. — Kathryn Flett

I used to sit in the studio with a copy of the (Saturday Evening) Post laid across my knees ... And then I'd conjure up a picture of myself as a famous illustrator and gloat over it, putting myself in various happy situations, surrounded by admiring females, deferred to by office flunkies at the magazines, wined and dined by the editor ... — Norman Rockwell

But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls. — Blake Bailey

Anyone who edits their own copy has a fool for an editor. — Donald Davis

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised. — Jane Lindskold

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century. — Richard Corliss

Spooner noticed another, smaller Marine Corps tattoo encircling Marlin's ankle: Semper Fi Forever. Everywhere he went these days, Spponer witnessed America's crying need for more copy editors. — Pete Dexter

The night copy editors actually handled the papers, every edition, hot off the presses. They left gray fingerprints on their keyboards and desks. They reminded Lincoln of moles. Serious people with thick glasses and gray skin. That might just be the lighting, he thought. Maybe he wouldn't recognize them in the sunshine. In full color. They — Rainbow Rowell