Editors Quotes - Page 7

• I was spurred by the fact that having worked for women's magazines myself as a journalist, if you go off and interview a female celebrity, I'd just go in and interview them like I'd interview any human being and talk about the things that interested me. And you'd come back, and you'd file your copy. And then my editor would read through my copy and go, why haven't you asked them if they want kids? And I'd be like, well, I don't know, I interviewed Aerosmith last week. And I didn't ask them that.

  Caitlin Moran

  Kids, Want, Lasts

  "Not A Feminist? Caitlin Moran Asks, Why Not?". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. July 29, 2016.

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• That shot in "Into the Inferno" somehow popped up while my editor and I were viewing the footage. I immediately said, "That looks like the opening shot because the camera approaches the action very slowly and we have enough time to insert some of the main credits into it." So it was a practical choice. At the same time, you see these tiny figures standing at the rim of something, and all of a sudden, the camera rises further and you find yourself looking straight down into an inferno.

  Werner Herzog

  Choices, Finding Yourself, Tiny

  Source: www.rogerebert.com

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• First, the three of us holed up in winter in a cabin and took the 500 hours down to twelve hours. Then we found an editor, Lambis Haralambidis. He took that twelve hours and brought it to five. Then we get together and started taking the ax and chopping off different parts of our film.

  Sam Pressman

  Winter, Together, Twelve

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• Editors always want to know what you're working on, what you're thinking about.

  Mary Downing Hahn

  Thinking, Want, Knows

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.

  Jim Crace

  Trying, Curls, Stories

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• Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.

  William Allen White

  Writing, Mean, Use

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• I work with a lot of different editors at different publishers and magazines and so on, and having a system of shared folders makes keeping track of things a snap.

  William Gurstelle

  Track, Different, Magazines

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• I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.

  Jonathon Keats

  Summer, Growing Up, Children

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The editor, Stephen Segal, actually called me with the idea of creating an accordion book [ "The Thorn & The Blossom"], and asked if I could write a story for it. I was so intrigued! I immediately knew that it had to be a love story told from the points of view of the two main characters. Right away, I started working on a proposal. And once I had my main characters, Brendan and Evelyn, it was as though they started telling me their stories.

  Theodora Goss

  Book, Character, Writing

  Source: www.bookequals.com

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• The format of the book was the idea of my wonderful editor, Stephen Segal. Stephen and I had worked together before, on projects for the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and when he got the idea for an accordion-style book, he called and asked if I could write the story for it. I told him that I would love to try! And I knew it had to be a love story, because that's the sort of story you really want to hear from both perspectives. I mean, imagine if Pride and Prejudice were told from Darcy's perspective as well as Elizabeth's. It would be quite a different story!

  Theodora Goss

  Art, Book, Mean

  Source: www.sfsignal.com

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• Ultimately, you just have to do what feels right for the film. It really helps when you have great collaborators like my editor, Eduardo Serrano, who kept telling me various scenes should be longer.

  Sonia Braga

  Helping, Film, Scene

  Source: www.rogerebert.com

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• If everybody can author their own story, if media is democratizing because everybody can make a really good-looking website... that's the way we learn now instead of in books. It means that more people get to tell their own story in their own terms rather than having to go through publishers and editors and executives.

  Rachel Maddow

  Book, Mean, Media

  "The Lenny Interview: Rachel Maddow". Interview with Grace Dunham, www.yahoo.com. April 21, 2016.

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• I wrote a letter to the magazine [Time magazine] pointing out that [Richard] Corliss's comparison of Christopher Lee's Saruman to Osama Bin Laden, and the vastly outnumbered defenders of Helm's Deep united against the Orcs to the "Coalition of the Willing" fighting the good fight against Muslim hordes, displayed the simplistic, xenophobic, and arrogant worldview that makes the government of the United States feared and mistrusted around the world. The editors claimed they had no space to print my brief letter, which I felt was dishonest and cowardly.

  Viggo Mortensen

  Fighting, Space, Government

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• The job of an editor in a publishing house is the dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world.

  John Hall Wheelock

  Jobs, Publishing House, World

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• I think more people now have relationships with agents than with editors. And I don't have an agent.

  Mary Downing Hahn

  Thinking, People, Agents

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Reporters have a different point of view and a different job. Consequently, to the extent that you can help them turn in an interesting story that their editor is going to like and that's going to further their careers, they're going to give you more ink and cover you.

  Roger Ailes

  Jobs, Views, Careers

  Source: www.campaignsandelections.com

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• I was the first records editor at Rolling Stone, and there were no rules. There was nothing to fall back on as to how do you write about this kind of music, so people were trying absolutely everything with a great sense of freedom and experimentation and success and failure, and a feeling of, “My God, people are actually paying attention to this. Let’s pretend they aren’t because we don’t want to be intimidated by what somebody might think of what we’re saying.

  Greil Marcus

  Fall, Writing, Thinking

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• Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

  John McGahern

  Book, Long, Finding Love

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• Embarrassed journalists ask me embarrassing questions, and they get embarrassing answers, and then hand out embarrassing stories to the embarrassing editors, who put them to the front pages of newspapers. When is this going to end?

  Yao Ming

  Embarrassing Questions, Hands, Stories

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• I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.

  Ed McBain

  Writing, Careers, Knowing

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• If you dared to put your opinion into a factual piece, your editors said, "You can't do this. Write an op-ed."

  Barbara Boxer

  Writing, Pieces, Opinion

  Source: www.cosmopolitan.com

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• The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors’ rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.

  Julian Schwinger

  Rejection, Criticism, Pressure

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• The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.

  Dominick Dunne

  Book, Writing, Editing

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• 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!

  Dave Barry

  Writing, Nuts, Long

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

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• The author with the greatest influence on me is my friend Stephen Harrigan, who critiques everything I write before I even bother to show it to my agent or editor. He's a truly great writer - author of Gates of the Alamo and other books you might know of, and his instincts about what's working in a story, and what's not, are just about perfect. My books would be very different without his influence.

  Elizabeth Crook

  Book, Writing, Perfect

  Source: www.elizabethcrookbooks.com

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