Famous Quotes & Sayings

Diane Wakoski

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

David Mitchell

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

Dave Barry

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Very few editors worry about heresy - their goals are much too commercial, thank goodness.

Austin O'Malley

Public opinion is the pennant on a nation's mast which shows the politician and the editor how to trim the sails.

Bill Nye

There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as "we"; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm.

Bill O'Reilly

The Denver Post has actually hired an editor to promote pot.

Bill Walsh

Machines aren't replacing proofreaders at all. Copy editors, who proofread and much, much more, use spellcheck as a tool but read every word that appears in the paper

Bill Walsh

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call

Eric Brown

Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.

Kate Thompson

Writers want publicity all the time, and they are always nagging their agents and publishers to give them more publicity, but, when you get it, it's kind of soul-destroying.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Scientists in different disciplines don't speak the same language. They publish in different journals. It's like the United Nations: You come together, but no one speaks the same language, so you need some translators.

Mark Helprin

Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.

Peter Brimelow

Textbook publishers don't even bother to advertise at their conventions.

J. A. Konrath

Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.

Isabel Allende

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

Nick Earls

I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere's a long way from the publishing industry now.

Denise Mina

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.