Sub Editor Quotes & Sayings

I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor. — Wolf Blitzer

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response. — David Bergen

The border between editing and ghostwriting is, at its extremes, a bit porous. An editor really improves and sometimes restructures a manuscript and suggests changes. — Judith Thurman

I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor. — Michael Crichton

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting. — Liane Moriarty

The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
-Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) US-English essayist, editor, anthologist — Logan Pearsall Smith

Data matters. It's the very essence of what we care about. Personal data is not equivalent to a real person - it's much better. It takes no space, costs almost nothing to maintain, lasts forever, and is far easier to replicate and transport. Data is worth more than its weight in gold - certainly so, since data weighs nothing; it has no mass. Data about a person is not as valuable as the person, but since the data is so much cheaper to manage, it's a far better investment. Alexis Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic, points out that a user's data can be purchased for about half a cent, but the average user's value to the Internet advertising ecosystem is estimated at $1,200 per year. Data's value - its power, its meaning - is the very thing that also makes it sensitive. The more data, the more power. The more powerful the data, the more sensitive. So the tension we're feeling is unavoidable. — Eric Siegel

She first one on the production team to die will be the editor. — Alexandra Oliva

I think there are probably a handful of real character actors in this business. The rest of us are recycling. So now I'm Sam Malone the editor. I'm Sam Malone the billionaire. — Ted Danson

An early editor characterized my books as 'romantic comedy for intelligent adults.' I think people see them as funny but kind. I don't set out to write either funny or kind, but it's a voice they like, quirky like me ... And you know, people like happy endings. — Elinor Lipman

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth. — Finn Wittrock

But human deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable if you're a food company, a definite career loser if you're nutritionist, and just plain boring if you're a newspaper editor or reporter. — Michael Pollan

A specific editor in a specific place likes the book, and you're in. A different editor on a different day goes, 'Oh, this isn't for me', or doesn't even look at it, and that's it. — Adrian McKinty

that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge. — Virginia Woolf

After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor. — Lynne Truss

Unless you are in the willingness and ease and ecstasy of some kind of moment, you may end up the editor of your thoughts and of your expressions. I find I'm that way on stage. — Alex Ebert

I have great editors, and I always have. Somehow, great editors ask the right questions or pose things to you that get you to write better. It's a dance between you, your characters, and your editor. — Patricia MacLachlan

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better. — Courtney B. Vance

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul. — Rob Bignell, Editor

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is. — Samuel S. Vaughan

After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults. — Rodman Philbrick

My first teacher was Steven Spielberg. I worked on Amazing Stories. That was my first job, as a writer and as a story editor. Watching him and his command of the tools of filmmaking, and his admiration for writing and the story itself, was the greatest lesson I ever had. — Mick Garris

The image of the copy editor is of someone who favours a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people's errors, a lowly person who is just starting on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i's and crossing the t's and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers. — Mary Norris

I write about people I think are interesting, and then I discuss it with my editor, and she decides if she thinks it will be interesting to children as well. If I have no great interest in the subject, I find the work to be terribly boring. And if I find the person interesting, I love the research part and, by extension, the writing as well. — David A. Adler

An editor is the uncrowned king of an educated democracy. — William Thomas Stead

I am the discoverer of Quantum Editing, the process whereby the amateur editor keeps being changed by the editing he does, requiring him to further edit the manuscript, changing him yet further, etc. — Matt Chatelain

{When Abraham Lincoln was 26 years old in 1835, he wrote a defense of Thomas Paine's deism; a political associate, Samuel Hill, burned it to save Lincoln's political career. Historian Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's papers, said Paine had a strong influence on Lincoln's style:}

No other writer of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Jefferson, parallels more closely the temper or gist of Lincoln's later thought. In style, Paine above all others affords the variety of eloquence which, chastened and adapted to Lincoln's own mood, is revealed in Lincoln's formal writings. — Roy Basler

I gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor. — Alice Walker

Although I still write, research and investigate, my role is primarily that of a publisher and editor-in-chief who organises and directs other journalists. — Julian Assange

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. — Will Allison

It was trying to make my tennis game look mildly respectable, which I found you don't even really need to practice if you have a really good editor. They can edit it and you're like, "Hey, it looks like I'm playing really well." That was the fun part, but it was like going to summer camp. — Paul Reiser

The right constraints can lead to your very best work. My favorite example? Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn't write a book with only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children's books of all time. — Austin Kleon

I had sent [the magazine] a batch of poems which they turned down flat. I was furious. Floss [my wife] said, 'If I were the editor of that magazine *I* would turn down what *you* sent.' So *she* picked a batch and they accepted them *all*. — William Carlos Williams

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?' — James Thurber