Quotes about Editing

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.

I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Every weekday morning, I picture my first paragraph while I hike with my dog Milo near Mulholland Drive, looking out over the San Fernando Valley. I edit the paragraph, then memorize it, so that when I get back home and sit down at my computer, the blank screen's tyranny lasts only a second or two. A brief reign!

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." [ Letter to Harrison Blake ; November 16, 1857]

Not that the story need to be long, but it will take a long time to shorten it.

Not that the story need to be long, but it will take a long time to shorten it.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip.