Editing Words Quotes & Sayings

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. — Betsy Lerner

I have fun just about everywhere I go. — Mavis Staples

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,
and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,
and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons. — Remy De Gourmont

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved. — Ashwin Sanghi

You know what they say about marriage? A man can either be right or happy. — James Runcie

For every hundred words I write (which might take about 10 minutes to spit out), I spend about 30 to 60 minutes of editing and rewriting. — Jeff Goins

Part of what makes a language 'alive' is its constant evolution. I would hate to think Britain would ever emulate France, where they actually have a learned faculty whose job it is to attempt to prevent the incursion of foreign words into the language. I love editing Harry with Arthur Levine, my American editor-the differences between 'British English' (of which there must be at least 200 versions) and 'American English' (ditto!) are a source of constant interest and amusement to me. — J.K. Rowling

Of every four words I write, I strike out three. — Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end. — Richard B. Knight

A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses. — S. Kelley Harrell

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes. — Guy Davenport

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. — Dr. Seuss

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied. — Gudjon Bergmann

Sometimes I wonder - if I were drop-dead handsome, and every woman I met actually dropped dead, would I ever get tired of it? — Robert Breault

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically:
His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong.
Her editor would cut that line. — Jaclyn Moriarty

If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it's not a matter of sloppy editing. I'm repeating myself. I'm reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right. And I'm still wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again because I am not finished with them. Any may never be. Work-in- progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on. — Robert Fulghum

I got quite the college experience. — Ryan Cabrera

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words. — Alessandra Torre

I love drafting like I love eating ice cream or having sex; I love revising like I love doing logic puzzles; I love line-editing like I love perfectly organizing a bookshelf; I hate reviewing copyedits and the second round of proofreading because, by then, I'm getting pretty tired of my own words. They all have their own challenges, though. — Tim Pratt

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own. — Naveed Saleh

I don't think music affects what words I choose to type in what order, within what punctuation, at this point, because I'm rereading and editing each sentence, at this point, in my published books, probably 100-150 times each, on average, and listening to probably 20-60 different songs in that time. — Tao Lin

Words are both my vocation and my avocation - reading, writing, editing, teaching. — Christina Baker Kline

[My mom] is quite the strict editor. I feel like maybe she has more of the old-school editing style, which really works in picture books, because you don't want to articulate anything in words that is already shown through the pictures. — Jenna Bush

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through. — Walter Mosley

It's not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely. — Anthony Marais

A brain is like a muscle, a serial connection that you should train everyday; if you don't use it, you loose it — Ana Claudia Antunes

Economist Peter Orszag witnessed the workings of vetocracy and its nefarious consequences. Writing in 2011, he reflected on what he had just witnessed as one of the top economic policymakers in the United States: "During my recent stint in the Obama administration as director of the Office of Management and Budget, it was clear to me that the country's political polarization was growing worse - harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing. . . . Radical as it sounds we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic. I know that such ideas carry risk. And I have arrived at these proposals reluctantly: they come more from frustration than from inspiration. But we need to confront the fact that a polarized, gridlocked government is doing real harm to our country. And we have to find some way out of it. — Moises Naim

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight. — Maya Lin

You Can Trust. Yes, but Try to remember even Demons had their wings. — Kent Ian N. Cny

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

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull. — Neal Asher

Here's one way that we try to actively and immediately bring in kindness in our meetings and camps: we ask our girls to stop before they speak and reevaluate what they're going to say based on this acronym:


True
Honest
Important
Necessary
Kind


Is what they're out to say True? Is it Honest? Is it Important? Necessary Kind?
We ask the to T.H.I.N.K. before they speak text, or type, and try to incorporate it into their daily lives -- especially within their interactions with their friends and classmates -- as much as possible. It's a choice girls can make: Do they want to encourage others with their words, or bring others down?

You might think this won't resonate with your middle school girl, but I promise that it works. It's not about self-editing or asking her not to speak her truth, of course; it's about thinking of others too. — Haley Kilpatrick

Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty. — Chuck Wendig

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly. — Merilyn Simonds

If you talk about yourself, he'll think you're boring. If you talk about others, he'll think you're a gossip. If you talk about him, he'll think you're a brilliant conversationalist. — Linda Sunshine

If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. — Neal Stephenson

I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions") — Michael Marshall Smith