Editor Quotations: What Writers Think about Their Editor
For many people, the work an editor does is a mystery. What do editors do and what do writers think of them?
Here are a few quotations about editors that might answer these questions. You probably will recognise some of the well-known writers who have offered their opinions on editors—some positive, some not.
A good editor understands what you’re talking and writing about and doesn’t meddle too much.
Irwin Shaw
A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.
Ring Lardner
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
John Barton
A very good editor is almost a collaborator.
Ken Follett
Always point your finger at the chest of the person with whom you are being. An editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an editor.
Jackie Kennedy
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
Adlai E. Stevenson
And that’s another piece of advice I’ll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
Jerry Pournelle
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
Alvin Toffler
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
Chuck Klosterman
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
Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one’s own understanding of how to understand the world.
Peter Davison
Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.
Josephus Daniels
Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Elbert Hubbard
I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it’s based on is whether it’s good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and trying to rewrite it.
Chuck Klosterman
I remember when an editor at the National Geographic promised to run about a dozen of my landscape pictures from a story on the John Muir trail as an essay, but when the group of editors got together, someone said that my pictures looked like postcards.
Galen Rowell
I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman – in spite of the fact that all three of them reacted positively I still have this fear.
Michael Chabon
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.
Lynn Abbey
If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.
Piers Anthony
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.
George Plimpton
My only claim to fame, if I have one, is that I’m an editor.
Woody Herman
Not too many people know who the editor is.
Julius Schwartz
Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn.
Tim Cahill
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S. Eliot quotes (American born English Editor, Playwright, Poet and Critic, 1888-1965)
SYCOPHANT, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor.
Ambrose Bierce
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
T.S. Eliot (American born English Editor, Playwright, Poet and Critic, 1888-1965)
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.
Mark Twain (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer. 1835-1910)
I know many journalists who would like to comment on the deep structure of their profession and its suck-up to advertisers, not to mention the dominant social order. But their editors won’t let them.
Richard Goldstein
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike (American writer, b.1932)
Editors are constantly on the watch to discover new talents in old names.
Israel Zangwill (English Writer, 1864-1926)
