Editorial Skills Quotes

I've had editors over the years who couldn't find a clue if it was stapled to their butt.

I'd love to find a lifelong female film editor as Scorsese has with Thelma Schoonmaker. I think women are probably, without generalising, sensitive to subtle things as an editor.

I worked as an assistant editor, actually, for a few years. That was right when I was just starting to get out at night and do a lot of stand-up, improv, and sketch work in New York. It really is invaluable. I think it pounded into me an awareness of what an editor wants and needs, in terms of clarity of a moment, where and when to start and stop a line.

Headline writing is an art form.

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.

An editor's job is to take something great and make it good.

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

Obviously, you know, I am known as an action director, and being a film editor previously had been a great advantage for me as an action director.

There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. They don't teach you that you're going to have to spend a lot of your life in crisis management.

The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

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.

An editor is like a professional reader, and as I became a better reader, I also became a better writer.