Editors Quotes - Page 25

I'm totally against the idea of a celebrity editor.

I had a great editor, Rebecca Corbett, from the time I was a city reporter right through to the years I worked on the 'Sun's' enterprise reporting team.

It's just about having faith in what I wrote and following through on the plan and making sure I get the pieces the way that I need them. It's just about executing properly in production and then in post, you know, it's working [with] and trusting my editor, and then also playing the film for people and seeing how they react.

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.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I have a huge editor in my head who's always making me miserable. But sometimes, I try to let my unconscious act out.

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

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

I feel like I have more experience with publishing humor than pretty much any editor I'm going to be dealing with so sometimes I'll get a little bit nuts if I write something I know is good a certain way, and some editor because of some restriction he has and wants to change it that I know is going to make it less funny that'll piss me off and then I'm inclined to go, "Well, hey I've been doing this a long time, maybe you should..." That doesn't happen that often, but I'm more likely to say that now than I would have been a long time ago. Because dammit, I'm infallible!

Always remember that if editors were so damned smart, they would know how to dress.

At certain times each year, we journalists do almost nothing except apply for the Pulitzers and several dozen other major prizes. During these times you could walk right into most newsrooms and commit a multiple axe murder naked, and it wouldn't get reported in the paper because the reporters and editors would all be too busy filling out prize applications.

When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)

It turns out she is Canadian, my editor, and so she drinks like a fish. So she wasn't a lightweight at all. And in the morning, she said that the idea still seemed like a good one, and here we are.

I met [my editor] in a bar where alcoholic beverages are served and I bought her one and I told her the idea. And she said that she liked it very much, which embarrassed me because I thought it meant that she was a lightweight and that in the morning, as so many women say to so many men, what seems like a good idea, you know, turns out not to be.

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

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.

I've seen people who stink, but the film editor shows them just where they didn't stink. But if you're empty and manipulative on stage, it's clear.

Sadly, too much has changed about publishing ... not only does attractiveness matter to agents and editors, but there's no room anymore for a reclusive writer.

Here's a slightly outrageous tip: Don't respect the text. Just because you've written something down doesn't mean it has a right to exist. If your internal editor can find a better way to say something, junk the original version and go with the new one. If you can't find a better way, and the passage really isn't good, junk it.

I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, "That was pretty good, it might go better." Maybe that's what I'll try to find.

When coming up with Wonder Woman cover designs, sometimes people will pitch ideas to me, either the writer or the editor. And it's interesting, because I know they're not trying to, but they end up pitching things that end up feeling like damsel-in-distress covers, where the tension comes from her needing to be rescued somehow. And it's something I immediately push back against.

Vision is an important part of being a good editor, but so is teamwork and grace.

The image isn't just created with the camera. That's just part one. The editor gets an imprint. The colorist does something to it. Visual effects does something to it. It's not just what you capture that people are going to see. The image gets made in many ways. In production and then in post.

Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt.