It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

You should edit before and after editing.

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...

So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts – written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus –...

Isn’t one of the first lessons of good elocution that there’s nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can’t, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing?...

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Stomach.” I wrote it with alphabet soup, and then edited it with a can of chicken noodle soup.

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

There should be no crying in copyediting.

[Women’s magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look...

An editor doesn’t just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its...

… The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper,...

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that’s a good thing.

It’s easy to see what to do once it’s already been done. The difficult time is before it’s to be done, and while you’re doing it. This is the difference between writing and editing.

When I’m writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I’m editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

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...

Don’t be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

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

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when...

manuscriptmeanuscriptmoanuscriptmanurescriptand so on

edit,” people will slow down and scour my words for errors. Did it wrok?

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Market it with the persistence of a drug peddler.

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had...

Border crossing’ is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work — editing, writing, and painting. I’m interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the...

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they’re more of an example to young people than adults books are.

A writer edits his thoughts more thoroughly the more readers he has. You can tell I only have two readers, myself included.

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

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...

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn’t feel trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a quote or incident that’s too perfect —a feeling I always had when...

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)A good novel editor is invisible.

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades...

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

I’m an open book—an open book I’m still writing and editing. My book is a romance novel, sort of like The Secret.

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.

A brain is like a muscle, a serial connection that you should train everyday; if you don’t use it, you loose it

What I don’t have in theater is editing.

Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium; it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in...

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.

On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature:It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for...

If you can listen to or read anything, but misspelled words offend you, raise your hadn.

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

The great correspondent of the seventeenth century Madame de Sevigne counseled, “Take chocolate in order that even the most tireome company seem acceptable to you,” which is also sound advice today!

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

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

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.”(Casual Chance, 1964)

Editing is kind of a solitary job.

I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.