Editing And Editors

(39 votes)   What I have crossed out I didn't like. What I haven't crossed out I'm dissatisfied with.

Cecil B. De Mille
1881-1959, American Film Producer and Director

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(231 votes)   Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist

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(169 votes)   An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

Adlai E. Stevenson
1900-1965, American Lawyer, Politician

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(123 votes)   Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.

Joseph Addison
1672-1719, British Essayist, Poet, Statesman

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(104 votes)   There is but one art, to omit.

Robert Louis Stevenson
1850-1895, Scottish Essayist, Poet, Novelist

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(94 votes)   Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole -- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Willa Cather
1876-1947, American Author

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(93 votes)   I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers.

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic

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(86 votes)   Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(84 votes)   Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Raymond Chandler
1888-1959, American Author

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

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic

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(82 votes)   Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling 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?''

James Thurber
1894-1961, American Humorist, Illustrator

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(82 votes)   Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.

Peggy Noonan
1950-, American Author, Presidential Speechwriter

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(71 votes)   In art economy is always beauty.

Henry James
1843-1916, American Author

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(70 votes)   The waste basket is a writer's best friend.

Isaac Bashevis Singer
1904-1991, Polish-born American Journalist, Writer

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(69 votes)   Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir.

Emily Dickinson
1830-1886, American Poet

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