Editing Quotes

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.

If someone doesn't understand the importance of sensitivity readers, chances are they may need them the most...

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity...edit one more time!

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own?

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.", 1964)