Quotes About Editors

There won't be editors in the future with the Internet world, with citizen reporting. That doesn't scare me.

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.

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

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

To practice - write each and every day if possible - then try to attend professional writer's conferences where you can learn your craft, get to know fellow writers, and meet editors and agents.

'The Paris Review's mandate has been the same for fifty years. First and foremost, this magazine is for writers; the editors' task is to support and celebrate them, especially at the beginning of their careers, but also as they move forward, venturing stories that are creative, risky, new.

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.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

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.

Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don't put too much trust in them.

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.

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

The professional cannot take rejection personally because to do so reinforces Resistance. Editors are not the enemy; critics are not the enemy. Resistance is the enemy. The battle is inside our own heads. We cannot let external criticism, even if it's true, fortify our internal foe. That foe is strong enough already.

Neither they nor Warren Rochelle (' Dual Attractions', 1999) nor Chris West (' Queer Fears and Critical Orthodoxies', 2002) (who focuses on homosexuality) ground their critiques in the periods in which Heinlein was writing, the editors he was writing for, or the librarians who could decide whether books did or did not make it onto the shelves in a period in which libraries were only just starting to retreat from the position of major purchasers.

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.

Learning on the job and having the backup of experienced editors are luxuries unavailable to many young journalists, and this puts new emphasis on what they need to know as they embark on that first job. It is somewhat akin to pickup sandlot sports. Sure, you can learn the game without a coach, but a coach can help the learning process.

Bezos also had a few strange notions about how the journalism process might be streamlined. He wondered aloud whether the paper would need so many editors if it simply hired great writers. Baron responded that if anything, the paper probably needed more editors. Bezos repeated that refrain so often that a few editors took to sending him the raw copy of high-profile journalists. Amazon said Bezos never received or read any such emails, but he eventually came to agree with Baron.

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

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.

Girls, we're fiction editors--we know how to plot, and we know how to cover our tracks. We can teach Jerry Key a lesson he'll never forget.

It remains a mystery to me why some of that [pulp] fiction should be judged inferior to the rafts and rafts of bad social [literary] fiction which continues to be treated by literary editors as if it were somehow superior, or at least worthier of our attention. The careerist literary imperialism of the Bloomsbury years did a lot to produce fiction's present unseemly polarities.

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

Most editors are failed writers. But so are most writers

Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit.