249 Quotes About Editing

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

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

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word?

Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

...our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand.

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

[I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing.

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?