Quote: The work was like peeling an onion. The outer skin came off with difficulty... but in no time you'd be down to its innards, tears streaming from your eyes as more and more beautiful reductions became possible. Author: Edward Blishen 1920-, British Actor
Quote: 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. Author: Willa Cather 1876-1947, American Author
Quote: 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. Author: Raymond Chandler 1888-1959, American Author
Quote: I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery. Author: Kate Chopin 1851-1904, American Author
Quote: When in doubt, delete it. Author: Philip Cosby
Quote: 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. Author: Emily Dickinson 1830-1886, American Poet
Quote: An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better. Author: T. S. Eliot 1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic
Quote: I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers. Author: T. S. Eliot 1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic
Quote: In art economy is always beauty. Author: Henry James 1843-1916, American Author
Quote: Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. Author: Samuel Johnson 1709-1784, British Author
Quote: If they have a popular thought they have to go into a darkened room and lie down until it passes. Author: Kelvin Mackenzie
Quote: What I have crossed out I didn't like. What I haven't crossed out I'm dissatisfied with. Author: Cecil B. De Mille 1881-1959, American Film Producer and Director
Quote: A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself. Author: Marianne Moore 1887-1972, American Poet
Quote: 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. Author: Peggy Noonan 1950-, American Author, Presidential Speechwriter
Quote: Editing is the same as quarreling with writers -- same thing exactly. Author: Harold Wallace Ross 1892-1951, American Newspaper Editor
Quote: The waste basket is a writer's best friend. Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer 1904-1991, Polish-born American Journalist, Writer
Quote: An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. Author: Adlai E. Stevenson 1900-1965, American Lawyer, Politician
Quote: There is but one art, to omit. Author: Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1895, Scottish Essayist, Poet, Novelist
Quote: 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? Author: Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist
Quote: 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?'' Author: James Thurber 1894-1961, American Humorist, Illustrator
Quote: Words and sentences are subject to revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision. Author: Barrett Wendell
Quote: There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them. Author: Elie Wiesel 1928-, Rumanian-born American Writer