54 Editing Quotes For Inspiration

Editing is both an art and a science, requiring not only a keen eye for detail but also a deep understanding of narrative flow and coherence. Whether you're sprucing up a manuscript, fine-tuning a report, or honing your personal writing skills, a little inspiration can go a long way. That's why we've curated a collection of the top 54 editing quotes to ignite your passion and refine your craft. Let these words from seasoned editors, celebrated authors, and literary greats inspire you to elevate your work to new heights.

1. “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)” - Colette

2. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.” - Richard Bach

3. “It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect--a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960)” - Jack McClelland

4. “I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.” - Jack McClelland

5. “The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)” - Jack McClelland

6. “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?” - Shaila Abdullah

7. “Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.” - Patricia Fuller

8. “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.” - Dr. Seuss

9. “Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!” - Nick Hornby

10. “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!” - CK Webb

11. “Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it.” - William Collins

12. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” - Stephen King

13. “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” - Stephen King

14. “I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.” - Jeanne Voelker

15. “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 only written eleven. Specifically: His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong.Her editor would cut that line.” - Jaclyn Moriarty

16. “We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create...It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!” - CK Webb

17. “If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?” - S. Kelley Harrell

18. “There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

19. “For most people, I edit. Most people are definitely getting along on the Cliffs Notes.” - Suzanne Finnamore

20. “I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions")” - Michael Marshall Smith

21. “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.” - Tiffany Madison

22. “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?” - Bridie Clark

23. “It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.” - Betsy Lerner

24. “When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.” - Betsy Lerner

25. “I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.” - Libba Bray

26. “[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 more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.” - Dalma Heyn

27. “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.” - Don Roff

28. “A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.” - S. Kelley Harrell

29. “Editing is the very edge of your knowledge forced to grow--a test you can't cheat on.” - S. Kelley Harrell

30. “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 they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

31. “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 some editors and it reads I AM NOT A REAL CHARACTER. I AM A PROBLEM YOU MUST DEAL WITH. The white characters are permitted to saunter about with their physical descriptions hanging out all over the place, but best not make mention of dark skin or woolly/curly hair or dark eyes (Unless, of course, that character is white. None of my white-skinned dark-eyed characters had any problem being described as such. And I’m pretty sure that Sól’s curly hair never gave anyone a single pause for thought.) As I said, I understand the desire not to define a POC simply by their physical attributes, and I understand cutting physical descriptions if no other character is described physically – but pussyfooting about in this manner with POC is doing nothing but white wash the characters themselves. It’s already much too hard to get readers to latch onto the fact that some characters may not be caucasian, why must we dance about their physical description as if it were some kind of shameful dirty little secret. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the way homosexuality used to only ever be hinted at in texts. It was up to the reader to ‘read between the lines’ or ‘its there if you look for it’ and all that total bullshit which used to be the norm.” - Celine Kiernan

32. “Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side.” - Eric T. Benoit

33. “When reading I pretend I’m an editor, though when writing I realize I’m not.” - Fierce Dolan

34. “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 reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.” - Jacob Weisberg

35. “I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” - Shannon Hale

36. “... 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, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

37. “Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.” - Verlyn Klinkenborg

38. “I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” - Vladimir Nabokov

39. “I quickly realized that I enjoyed editing more than writing. I felt more suited to it and it fit my nurturing personality. I had lots of ideas and a strong sense of structure, and I enjoyed working with talented writers, relishing the give-and-take in making their work better.” - Lynn Povich

40. “Don't all Air Pirates know how to fry?” - Jack Lewis Baillot

41. “There should be no crying in copyediting.” - Carol Fisher Saller

42. “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.” - Laura Kreitzer

43. “I have a real problem with bloat -- I write like fat ladies diet.” - Stephen King

44. “Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.” - Stephanie Roberts

45. “I've reached that final moment of editing a book—the one where the text manifests as a living breathing person and starts slugging me in the face.” - Richard Due

46. “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 old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways.” - Terri Windling

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

48. “Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.” - Don Roff

49. “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.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

50. “Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.” - Red Red Rover

51. “Self publishing' is not as easy as it is portrayed! When you think you have finished your book, proof read, proof read again, and again, and again. Don't believe it is ready until you have a hard copy proofed!” - Phil Simpkin

52. “As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

53. “Editing is like pruning the rose bush you thought was so perfect and beautiful until it overgrew the garden.” - Larry Enright

54. “Being discouraged is natural but giving up is not an option.” - Courtney Worth Young