Top 150 Editors Quotes

When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I’m not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.

When I first started with ‘Twilight,’ I didn’t have any experience. I didn’t know what I was doing. So I was pretty intimidated by the editors and the publishers, and I felt like I was a kid in school with the principal telling me what to do! It was hard for me.

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.

When U.S.-based editors and columnists parachute into a news storm, it is often the stringers who keep us out of trouble, helping us glimpse the complexity behind the headlines.

I depend on good editors and a good director.

I’ve been around so long, most editors think I’m dead.

I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

My scripts, they’re pretty serious. I basically just describe stuff. I don’t put too many notes and letters to the editors. But when I wrote ‘KGBLT,’ in parentheses I wrote, ‘Well this is the best thing I’ve ever written. It will all be downhill from here. I’m so sorry for the rest of my career.’

There really are so many lines of work that you can join that don’t have to only be design. And that was one that particularly interested me a lot, because the editors could appreciate all the trends, all the designs and all the work of the designers.

The Bush administration works closely with a network of rapid response digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our troops.’

In my experience, with very few exceptions – I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions – the one thing that most editors don’t want to do is edit. It’s not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed.

Honestly, I’ve never had anybody with ‘Teen Mom‘ ever be anything but great to me. Except the editors – they suck. Everybody from the crew, I love them, they’re like family to me… I’ve never had a problem with any of them. Except the editors.

For the most part, editors no longer view ‘Doonesbury’ as a rolling provocation, which is fine by me. It makes no sense to intentionally antagonize the very people on whose support you most depend.

I think that they had afforded me many opportunities to do good work there, and I think I did. It was a wonderful four years. I really worked with some great people, terrific producers, terrific editors.

Which editor? I can’t think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.

I happen to have a public profile. Ditto newspaper editors. It’s a result of what I do, not an end.

With an audience it’s now, there are no editors around. It’s just me and the audience and it’s what I like best.

Media is set up to give information to the people – at least that’s what it says. But we all know in the U.S. that media is a capitalistic system, people are getting paid to write things, they have bosses and editors, and they have bosses, and they put pressure on people to write intriguing stories that catch the eye.

There are more women editors than people realise. I think we’re more able to keep our eye on what the film needs. Between men, sometimes it’s a real ego battle, and that’s very bad for the film.

I think on civilian casualties they could do more. It’s actually something I’ve discussed with the editors involved. They’re aware of it, and I’m hopeful that there will be more reporting on that.

I believe I’m a better writer now than I was when I started. I’m grateful that I had good guidance because you don’t make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.

We are very private, so we decided from early on that we will keep the press and editors and everybody out of our house.

Authors don’t tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey’s first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of ‘B Is for Burglar.’

I do a lot of brainstorming with my editors.

I think editors have to come out of a certain kind of community.

I’m very lucky in that my agent and my editors know better. They don’t push me. Because I don’t take that well.

There’s a lot of stuff they don’t teach you in the mythical editors’ school. They don’t teach you that you’re going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women’s stories. God, the BBC’s practically run by women.

I know that many authors say editors don’t edit anymore, but that’s not been true in my experience.

There are so many magazines and so many editors out there that you have to be different.

The thing with newspapers is that they are a filter. We’re relying on the editors of that paper to be a filter and to tell you that this is worth reading about, this is quality, and this is quite reliable.

Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.

There’s nothing that compares with the time spent all by myself on a creation that is all my own. I still think of my solo work as my ‘home planet‘ in comics, though I’ve learned to listen much more to editors and trusted friends for feedback.

I don’t know how the editors are going to take it or how it may be received. But to some extent I’m hoping that with the next book, when people pick it up and read it, it will scare the pants off of them.

My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With ‘How to Save a Life’, I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.

At last, the newspapers discovered the Bears. I kept writing articles about upcoming games, and by reading the papers, I learned editors like superlatives. I blush when I think how many times I wrote that the next game was going to be the most difficult of the season or how a new player was the fastest man in the West.

You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn’t something that most writers can’t strive for or identify. It’s something even the best agents and editors can’t always identify.

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.

Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It’s an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I’d ever submitted to New York editors.

Liberman said to me, ‘I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don’t like it. They say the photographs burn on the page . After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.

The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn’t any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.

I think women are vital to the future of the superhero comics and the entire industry – as creators, as editors, as consumers, as retailers.

The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.

Many people – especially those people who earn livings by convincing editors and bookers that rich and influential strangers consider their thoughts and opinions interesting – have ideas about who should or should not run for president.

As an actor, you can go in, and you give your best performance, but if you hand that performance to ten different directors and ten different editors, you get ten different movies.

Most of the good people of my generation… had offers to become editors, but the thought of going inside was just absolutely horrifying.

In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, prime ministers and the like – parenting is far more challenging.

Certain media-related developments in the country are raising questions regarding its objectivity and credibility. Paid news and the declining roles of the editors and their editorial freedom is posing a major threat to the Indian media.

Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.

On a book like ‘X-Men,’ you have to stay true to the established fiction, working with editors to ensure continuity, sometimes across multiple titles.

Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

The publisher has told – you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative.

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book.

In the newspaper business, I was in the last generation before the arrival of the personnel manager. You were hired by editors – and editors who would take a chance on what they perceived to be talent and not hire a resume.

I broke into comics by working as a press reporter for the industry, for a trade press in comics, and reporting on events and reporting on books and so forth, and I got to know some of the editors at DC Comics in the mid-’80s.

America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don’t actually like books.

Editors have grown timid… a brave advance is almost inevitably followed by quick back-tracking, generally by dilution and debasement of the original intention.

I tend to be a bit of a proselytiser for the importance of royal courts, but all politics – in fact every form of human organisation, and this is something that’s so dreadful for all those brought up in the 60s – naturally reverts to monarchy. Newspapers have editors, companies have chief executives.

So much crap passes as information that not only does the audience sometimes miss the distinction between news and crap, the editors sometimes miss the distinction.

When I came out publicly, some photo editors had a field day searching for pictures of me with a limp wrist or some other stereotypical gay signifier – as though, after decades in the public eye, they’d suddenly come across a trove of shots where I looked like a Cher impersonator.

I would rate my TV football skills as an amazing achievement by the editors.

I think what we need, especially in publishing, is more commissioning editors and editors who are people of colour.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, ‘You’re a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.’

I wasn’t weaned on the web nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.

Sure, some journalists use anonymous sources just because they’re lazy and I think editors ought to insist on more precise identification even if they remain anonymous.

The error that we tend to make is that we think that women’s magazines are what editors want and what their readers want – and thus are social indicators – when, in fact, they are what advertisers want. They’re just advertising indicators.

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised.

Write every day; never give up; it’s supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can’t look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

Somebody has to pay our editors, writers, journalists, designers, developers, and all the other specialists whose passion and tears go into every chunk of worthwhile web content.

Alan Rusbridger is, to many, among the most admired newspaper editors of our time.

Since fantasy isn’t about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it’s changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I’ve never been able to sell. I’m known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

I’m sitting there for hours editing the vids myself. But I have a PR company and a management company. I use some editors for some of the cooking videos because they can be so long.

Editors of conservative magazines aren’t out trying to raise money. The money is there; the cash reserves are in the bank.

If you’re interested in a ‘Teen Vogue’ internship, take note: it’s not all fun and games! Working at a magazine requires a ton of energy and endurance from its interns and editors alike.

There’s something about the alchemy of the show – the actors, the writers, the directors, the editors – that makes ‘Parenthood‘ unique. You get so deeply embedded with these characters because you go through life with them, and that’s our priority.

Successful model? That’s a myth. The year I modeled was the most painful year of my life. Editors would always talk to you in the third person as though you were merely a piece of merchandise.

Since September 11 2001, editors in America have faced some excruciating choices, as the attempt to wage a war against a new kind of enemy sometimes strained the boundaries of our laws and values.

The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I’m not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it’s torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.

If there had been three public editors before me, the body might have absorbed it a little bit better.

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.

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

Most writers adore their editors, and I’m no exception.

Very few editors worry about heresy – their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness.

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists.

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.

I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.

It takes a lot of time and good editors, which luckily we have, to make me look like Jamie Tartt.

I’ve learned now to have a second title in reserve because, frequently, I come up with titles that seem to make editors’ hair fall out.

The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all ‘bottom line‘ editors; everything depends on the money.

I met Ulrika Jonsson on December 8, 2001, at some party hosted by the Daily Express, or maybe it was the Daily Star. The FA wanted me to travel around to various newspapers to be courteous and meet the editors. I visited the News Of The World too, and met a woman with big, red hair. I didn’t memorise her name.

Look, obviously that was – created quite a firestorm, but Newsweek editors have made clear that this was a situation where, you know, a solid, well-placed source provided some information.

When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.

The role of designers and product makers is to really become much better editors. What kind of functionality is actually needed – and truly delightful – to consumers? Remove all the extraneous stuff.

When my editors and I at ‘Rolling Stone‘ came up with the idea to do a profile of General McChrystal, I simply just e-mailed General McChrystal’s press staff, said we wanted to do a profile, and said if you could give us any time to hang out with the general, that would be great.

I think it sort of dawns on you that if you’re not gigging constantly you’re not actually relevant. You may be relevant to a different part of the media now, to television commissioners and editors, but to a young live-comedy audience you’re not, really.

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate, and infinitely better looking.

One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception – at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.

I first met Susan Sontag in spring 1976 when she was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help type her correspondence. I had been recommended by the editors of ‘The New York Review of Books,’ where I’d worked as an editorial assistant.

I believe that all brands will become storytellers, editors and publishers, all stores will become magazines, and all media companies will become stores. There will be too many of all of them. The strongest ones, the ones who offer the best customer experience, will survive.

Once upon a time, gatekeepers were newspaper publishers and magazine editors and people who ran radio stations and news networks. And they decided what went above the fold and what went on page A10.

While editors and newspaper owners currently fret over shrinking readership and lost profits, they do the one thing that insures cutting their own throats; they keep reducing space for the one feature that attracts new young readers in the first place; the comic strips.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King’s, and the other wasn’t selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King’s. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.

With ‘California,’ editors were reading it, and fast, and others were emailing my agent to request it. Ultimately, there were a few editors interested in the book, and it sold at auction about two weeks after the submission process started. I couldn’t believe it!

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

Most editors are just worried about their jobs. They’re overwhelmed. They’re underpaid. They do the best they can.

Sometimes you’re talking to a tennis ball on a stick, and you have to imagine what is supposed to be there and trust that the editors and the animators are going to make it all convincing to the audience. You have to pull a lot from within.

‘The Post’ is a fairly fusty place when it comes to profanity. If a reporter tries to get a bad word into a story, the word is usually forwarded to top editors, who consider it with the gravity and speed that the Vatican applies to candidates for sainthood.

A very important part of my workday are the two Nunzillas on my windowsill. They keep me constant company. They’re little windup toys, and when they move across the desk, they spark from the mouth. I think of them as my editors. They sort of remind you that the world can be a silly place.

In one sense, newspaper editor is an appropriate job for an out-of-work politician; politicians live the news cycle as intensely as editors.

I had a hard time publishing my books in the beginning of my career, because editors were afraid what people would think of THEM, personally, if their name was associated with me.

Try to meet as many authors, agents, and editors as you can.

There’s a curiosity about what magazine editors do, the behind-the-curtain experience.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn’t write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

For commercial books in a genre, readers’ and editors’ expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers’ guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not).

As large publishers turn into monopolies, and the MBAs who are running them – maybe editors used to run them before – are steadily tightening the screws, they feel more and more that they get to call the shots.

Of course there are some actors that are better than others and performances that are better than others, but they’re always embedded in the greater film. They are mediated through the work of so many other people: the director directs, the lighter sets the scene, the editors edit, the music gets put to it.

When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, ‘Oh, that’s okay. That’s not a real book.’

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’

The editors and the creators of ‘The Bachelor‘ and ‘The Bachelorette,’ they are so good at casting and at finding these young, beautiful lunatics to go on the show.

The people who despise America are the editors of the ‘New Statesman.’ Their green-card applications must have been turned down.

When I was 14, I entered British Vogue’s annual talent contest and got a special mention. I went up to London to meet the editors and wrote about it in my high school magazine.

Rupert Murdoch has been around since the dinosaurs. He knows how to get around any independent board – as he did with me, and as he’s done with other editors as well.

I had a wonderful and very successful career in New York and had the privilege of working with some of the best editors and publishers in the business.

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

When I decided to launch my first knitwear line, it was because I saw a void in the basics category. The editors were always looking for cool, fashion-forward tees and sweaters. So that’s where I started.

I’m fortunate to work for a company that supports investigative journalism with strong editors and lawyers. That’s the benefit of working for a company that’s been around for more than a century.

I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.

Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.

Not many poets have editors.

Twitter is like overhearing people’s conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

The paradox of being in an industry where other people are usually the gatekeepers: publishers, editors – there are a lot of barriers to having control over your career. But coming out of hip-hop, the mindset was always to create your own.

It’s hard selling books in general: companies are merging, editors being laid off, bricks-and-mortar bookstores closing, large chain bookstores squeezing out independents, and online retailers squeezing out chain bookstores.

I did a lot of theater, so especially as an on-camera camera actor, there are so many things that aren’t in your toolbox. They’re somebody else’s job. You think about editors and rhythm. Volume isn’t even in your control.

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

When I talk to friends and editors about possible projects, especially about projects that might come with a significant cash advance, they usually suggest a biography. Sometimes I’m tempted, but the prospect of spending years researching and writing about someone else’s life offends my vanity.

Newspapers and their editors have to become as accountable as the rest of us – they are not ‘a special case,’ and they have only themselves to blame for having lost the argument for ‘exceptionalism’ – and with it the right to ‘self-regulation.’

Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it.

In the early ’70s – a very good time for children‘s books and their authors – editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.

I respect and empathize with reporters and editors who must compete in today’s environment. And I know full well that when I’ve been covering campaigns, which I still do, I’ve made my mistakes and have been far from perfect.

It doesn’t matter that millions read as long as you share it with somebody. So I don’t really think about readers or editors. You especially should never think of editors – especially never think about reviewers.

I remember once when I was working on a magazine, and one of the male editors was going on a field trip with one of his sons. The office was full of, ‘He’s such a good dad,’ whereas I came in late from a doctor‘s appointment for one of my children and was asked, ‘Where were you? You’ll need to make up the time.’

Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that’s what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

Like all editors, I assume, I’m a reactor.

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: ‘If she writes anything else, do let us know.’ Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

I’ve had editors over the years who couldn’t find a clue if it was stapled to their butt.