Alexander Chee Quotes

An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

The main thing is that you have a good editor - one that believes in you and who will give you the feedback that you need to produce a good book.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

Editors, for the most part, don't care ''what'' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they.

It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

Every writer needs an editor. I don't care how good you are or think you are.

I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor.

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

I've hung around in absolute exhaustion and starvation waiting for an idea to hit, which might have been months. I've talked things over with editors, found out what they wanted, and when they wanted it delivered.

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.

If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

If someone picks up one thing you've written, you want them to go, 'Wow, this is pretty good.'

I do feel that I'm talking to someone who's in a totally different place from where I was when I started modeling. I was fortunate enough to have the wonderful designers and amazing photographers around me, and editors that I knew, and if I wanted to ask a question, I asked them. So that gap has broadened a bit.

I have a secret goal with my editor - he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

It's easy to write something average or even something good. But writing well is quite challenging.

A good day's writing, when I turn off my computer after I know that I've written okay, or as well as I can write, that's a day well spent.

The information highway is being sold to us as delivering information, but what it's really delivering is data... Unlike data, information has utility, timeliness, accuracy, a pedigree... Editors serve as barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent saying no.

Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.

Editors may think of themselves as dignified headwaiters in a well-run restaurant but more often [they] operate a snack bar . . . and expect you to be grateful that at least they got the food to the table warm.