Bill O'Reilly Quotes

Everybody needs an editor.

Although no one loves a typo, it's close to impossible to eradicate every single little mistake in a manuscript.

Machines aren't replacing proofreaders at all. Copy editors, who proofread and much, much more, use spellcheck as a tool but read every word that appears in the paper.

The life of an editor is not a glamorous one. You're a fixer; you make things better.

My self-editing process is intense.

Copy editors are very important and too rarely praised.

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

I used to work as a proofreader at Merrill Lynch.

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

Once you've finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it's consistent, what shape it really has. You can't tell that while you're working on it.

If any sort of error is inexcusable, it's an incorrect phone number. One of the cardinal rules of copy editing is that every phone number published must be checked.

Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.