272 Quotes About Editors

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A Lie" from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

It is free speech, just edited into defeat.

But after the war, when editors like Martin Durk came to prominence by trumpeting the timely death of the novel, Parish opted for a reflective silence. He stopped taking on projects and watched with quiet reserve as his authors died off one by one--at peace with the notion that he would join them soon enough in that circle of Elysium reserved for plot and substance and the judicious use of the semicolon.

You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.

Most of these editors, as they call themselves, couldn't even effectively edit a haiku.

If there were an unusual number of 'typos' (typographical errors) in their work--well, the lurking fear of a Winchester slug in the back might account for many mistakes.

Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.