Editorial Judgment Quotes

The reason 'Detox' didn't come out was because I didn't like it.

Thomas, my 15-year-old, is effectively my editor, I've always trusted his voice, more than anybody, on the strip for years. He has one of those ears that's just tuned to the rhythm of humor, so if he says something's not funny, my stomach just hurts because I know he's right, and it's already been drawn.

Now, if they're there to talk about something specifically, and I determine through my own editorial judgment, that another area isn't germane, or isn't an important part of it, that's something else. But we never agree to anything in advance, absolutely not.

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

One of the things I regret is that magazines now are so lifestyle-orientated that the opportunity to do bigger projects is gone. This is a serious misjudgment on the part of magazine editors.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

What comes with a job as a staff member of the BBC is a certain self-censoring that you get utterly used to. You don't say everything you think. You hold back on some things.

The decision of what, when, and how to publish is for editors, not judges.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

I don't know what makes a good feature story. I've always assumed that if it was a story that interested or amused me, that it would have the same impact on other people.

Needless, heedless, wanton and deliberate injury of the sort inflicted by Life's picture story is not an essential instrument of responsible journalism.

A newspaper may somewhat arrogantly assert that it prints "all the news that's fit to print." But no newspaper yet has been moved to declare at the end of each edition, "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite does.

I don't do any research. It's all about gut. Editing - it's always about gut.

A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought. His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God.

I think editors have to come out of a certain kind of community.

An experienced slush-pile reader doesn't need more than a few seconds to see if a story has potential. You don't need to eat all of a rotten egg to determine that it's rotten.

You’re not buying news when you buy The New York Times. You’re buying judgment.

If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Newspaper men, perhaps more than any other class, are rated by ability.

I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way.

The average citizen in this county has more intelligence and sense in his little finger than the editor of 'The New York Times' has in his whole head.

Writers would submit scripts to me, and if I liked one well enough to submit to magazine editors, I had the know-how whether the story was good or bad.

There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful.