Editor's Role Quotes

In fact, I spent 25 years as a reporter, swearing I would never become an editor. Sitting at a desk, watching other people go out and find the story, and then fussing with other people's words - I just didn't get the appeal of that.

He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.

There's this kind of incredibly mistaken idea that because it's so much cheaper to roll the camera than it used to be and it's so much easier to accumulate a ton of footage, that then you can just go shoot a ton of footage and the editor will make sense out of it. But if you don't have something deliberate made, you're not gonna save it in the editing room.

[on editing of the films] There is always a question of time, and the director. I've worked with a lot of directors who don't mind my involvement. They appreciated it.

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.

I cut 'Deer Hunter' myself.

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.

One thing I have noticed is that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's. You give the author your thoughts, and it's up to him or her to decide what to do.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting that, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want. And also, the problems editors run into when trying to edit performances - it helps me head that off at the pass a little.

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

I did a guest shot on a comedy series where they did 20 to 30 takes of everything. It's just gone by then. The joke is over. It's not funny anymore, and then of course, the editor's the one that has to figure out the timing. I think a lot depends on that.

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

Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that's hard.

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.

I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in 'Best Horror of the Year.'

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

In my experience, with very few exceptions - I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions - the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed.

And then my editor really likes that because he's left alone to do what...to create those things instead of me breathing over his shoulder and I like it because I don't have to sit in the editing room all day. I get to watch just dailies.

Being an editor it's a complicated job, but the last impression I'd want anybody to have is that it's onerous. It's a joy - a complicated joy, but a joy.

The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.

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

Am I missing something because of my lack of education? Being an intellectual - I'm not. So I hire him as a corner man, like a boxer; he watches me and tells me what I do wrong before I go in for the next round. Barry thought he was going to write what became Executioner's Song, and I told him he wasn't going to. And Barry's closest friend was Joan Didion.

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

There are many things that matter much more than an editor's gender in shaping the direction of the leadership.

I write about people I think are interesting, and then I discuss it with my editor, and she decides if she thinks it will be interesting to children as well. If I have no great interest in the subject, I find the work to be terribly boring. And if I find the person interesting, I love the research part and, by extension, the writing as well.