Editorial Criticism Quotes

I was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, 'It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'

Apple has a passion to deliver the most amazing, innovative - and, in fact, I got criticized because in "Win," there are at least 10 references to what Steve Jobs has done, and Apple's done, in that my editor said it's too much. But Apple is a passionate company.

When I wrote my blog and went to fashion week, I got a lot of shade from older editors about paying my dues and educating myself. I get where they were coming from, but it's also weird now to see their institutions scramble to use the internet in a way that's not savvy, but genuinely effective and exciting to people. I've been doing that for years.

You must write for the waste basket.

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.

I think I'm equally as abusive as the editors normally are for the "Letters and Tomatoes" column, which is the fan mail part of MAD Magazine and an ongoing feature.

I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that [Clay] Felker is destroying this paper. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

You can verify that in news meetings I sometimes say, 'This is skewed too far to the left,' or 'The mix of stories seems overweeningly appealing to a reader with a certain set of sensibilities, and it shouldn't.'

If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.

My first job in the States was as a junior fashion editor at 'Harper's Bazaar,' which I enjoyed, but not for all that long because I was fired by the editor in chief, who told me that I was too 'European.'

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.

When the New Yorker turned down work, they turned it down in such an elaborately gentlemanly way making apologies for their own shortsightedness. Undoubtedly it was their fault but somehow for some reason this fell short of the remarkably high standard that you by your own work have set for yourself. They had a way of rejecting my work that made me feel sorry for them somehow.