Editing Quotes

“...our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke which nobody else could understand.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“The first draft is black and white. Editing gives the story color.”
― Emma Hill

“Most often when I stammer
That's my brain
Correcting my grammer.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”
― Blaise Pascal

“A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, How You Can Write Your Dream Book

“You can always fix crap. You can’t fix a blank page.”
― Christina Dodd

“Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Once you’ve got to the end, and you know what happens, it’s your job to make it look like you knew exactly what you were doing all along”
― Neil Gaiman

“No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.”
― Merilyn Simonds, Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: A Book Lover Bridges the Digital Divide

“An aspiring writer should write one time and edit ten times.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Good writing is both what one does and does not say.”
― Jessica de la Davies

“Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.”
― Charles Bukowski

“A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“[T]hey are trying to find the right word, to choose, finally, the one that is most exact, most incisive. It's a process of sifting, which is exhausting and, at times, exasperating. Writers can't avoid it. The heart of the craft lies there.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“Writers come in two principal categories -- those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure.”
― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

“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?”
― John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

“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.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Another thing your teachers didn't tell you is that one day, arguments over whether or not to capitalize the word internet would constitute half your workday and lead to severed ties with many people you once considered close friends and family.”
― Emmy J. Favilla, A World Without "Whom": The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age

“How, then, to proceed? My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the “P” zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.

The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?

The interesting thing, in my experience, is that the result of this laborious and slightly obsessive process is a story that is better than I am in “real life” – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.

And what a pleasure that is; to be, on the page, less of a dope than usual.”
― George Saunders

“It is free speech, just edited into defeat.”
― Brian Spellman

“A book that is made up of only great sentences is not necessarily a great book.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the rods clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“A story that needs to have words said about it, is a story that does not contain all its own right words.

-- Introduction to Varley's "Persistence Of Vision" collection”
― Algis Budrys

“If we use the ‘pen of fiction’ to edit the ‘narrative of fact’ in order to justify our choices, we will soon discover that the pen is in fact a pencil.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“編輯是全方位工作者，文字能力是基本要求，溝通協調是家常便飯，更重要的是優雅解決問題的能力、笑著面對挑戰的勇氣！／有能力的話就買書吧！買書是對作者、對編輯、對所有出版從業人員最大的支持／其實你可以幫任何一本書寫導讀，只要你找得到它特出的地方／這是一份失敗了檢討自己，成功了榮耀歸於他人的工作，如果想要肯定一本書，或是身為在幕後的編輯拍拍，最好的方式就是把書買回家／現代人，特別是出版從業人員，如果沒有自嘲和自娛的能力，要怎麼在這險惡的冰河時期，維持健全的心靈呢？”
― 許喻理（Yuli）, 編輯小姐Yuli的繪圖日誌：劇透職場，微厭世、不暗黑的辦公室直播漫畫

“When I was learning the anthologist’s trade many years ago, sitting at the knees—metaphorically speaking, at least—of veteran anthologists like Damon Knight and Robert Silverberg, I was taught that you should always save your strongest and best story for last.”
― Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection

“Editing a written text is a collaborative enterprise that commences with the other parties commenting up the author’s initial ideas and it can include technical assistance in correction of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, poorly structured sentences, vague or inconsistent statements, and correcting errors in citations. Editing is as much as an art form as writing a creative piece of literature. A good editor is a trusted person whom instructs the writer to speak plainly and unabashedly informs the writer when they write absolute gibberish. Perhaps the most successful relationship between a writer and an editor is the storied relationship shared by Thomas Wolfe and his renowned editor, Maxwell Perkins. By all accounts, the prodigiously talented and mercurial Wolfe was hypersensitive to criticism. Perkins provided Wolfe with constant reassurance and substantially trimmed the text of his books. Before Perkins commenced line editing and proofreading Wolfe’s bestselling autobiography Look Homeward, Angel,’ the original manuscript exceeded 1,100 pages. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Thomas Wolfe declared that his goal when writing “Look Homeward, Angel,” was “to loot my life clean, if possible of every memory which a buried life and the thousand faces of forgotten time could awaken and to weave it into a … densely woven web.” After looting my own dormant memories by delving into the amorphous events that caused me to lose faith in the world and assembling the largely formless mulch into a narrative manuscript of dubious length, I understand why a writer wishes to thank many people for their assistance, advice, and support in publishing a book.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“I have a confession. I'm a little OCD when I post on social media – I tend to edit more than I should. But then I started thinking, maybe we should all edit a little more - our posts, our thoughts, our words.”
― Traci Lea LaRussa

“If it's not right, keep editing until it is. ~ Life”
― Curtis Tyrone Jones