Publication Standards Quotes

You know, one wonderful thing that came out of my Enquirer experience is that, in my case, it was ruled tabloids are magazines. Which means they didn't have the protection that a newspaper has.

I came over here and worked for rock magazines, and I worked for Rolling Stone, which has a very high standard of journalism, a very good research department.

Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough.

I have no trouble publishing in Soviet astrophysical journals, but my work is unacceptable to the American astrophysical journals.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it. But know that, five years from now, as fans or prospective employers are looking over your published pages, no one will care that this story sucks because the publisher moved the deadline up or because the editor made you work an android cow into the story. All they will care about is what they see in front of them, and they will hold you responsible for it, no one else.

It wouldn't happen... There hasn't been one publication by a monkey

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

When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.

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

When we started publishing, you had to be better than good. You had to be excellent. But as long as people are reading, I don't care what they're reading.

An editor's job is to take something great and make it good.

What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for [The New Republic ], I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing [fire a journalist].

It is unpleasant for the players, when the organizers arrange for play to take place in the morning. The games from such last rounds, in view of the large number of mistakes, are not fit for publication!

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

Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.

Much of an editor's job is in fact pretty nanny-like in nature: in many ways, you're there to protect and defend, to reassure and clean up. What I ask from writers is respect. I want them to respect me enough to turn in a clean draft. I want that draft to be as good as they can make it. I want to feel the thought behind those words. And I want it to be turned in on time. It drives me wild when I get a story that's obviously slapped together, and the same can be said for a manuscript; you should respect your reader enough to give her something that reflects your best efforts.

It is common, and encouraged by many journals, for research to be judged by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it. But as a journal's score is an average, it says little about the quality of any individual piece of research.

I am guaranteeing you that if you see my byline on a story, it's going to be the cleanest story you've ever read.

I have seen journals with good financial backing and editorial support die because they looked so bad nobody wanted to publish them.

Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.

If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.

If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.