I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a ...hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it.... I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone's coiffure--except those that please me--and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It's this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light... I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:... We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Managing Editor: That's rotten. 'Costello slaying starts gang war.' That's what I want. Copy Chief: I'm working on that angle.... I've got four men on it. Managing Editor: Four. You'll need forty men on this story for the next five years. You know what's happening. This town is up for the grabs, get me. You know Costello was the last of the old- fashioned gang leaders. There's a new crew coming out, and every guy that's got money enough to buy a gun is going to try to step in his place. You see, they'll be shooting each other like rabbits for the control of the booze business. You get it. It'll be just like war. That's it--war. You put that in the lead. War--gang war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be an editor, as I was. Then to lie here close by the river over the place... Where the sewage flows from the village, And the empty cans and garbage are dumped, And abortions are hidden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Jack: A politician, huh? Editor: Oh, county treasurer or something like that.... Jack: What's so special about him? Editor: They say he's an honest man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history... of human speech.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something good ...in every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are too many coy books full of talking animals, whimsical children, and condescending adults. (Some of the most famous anima...ls in the world have talked, but they talked real talk and they weren't called silly names like Doody and Mooloo. They were called names like The Cheshire Cat and they asked sensible questions like "Did you say pig, or fig?")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Following publication of an advertisement of a "Barbacue & Ice" at Beauchamp's Springs, at which congressional candidates were to ...speak, the editor of the Houston Morning Star, of July 4, 1839, said: "(It will) not be an unfavorable opportunity for these gentlemen to express their true politics ... provided ... the liquors do not prove too powerful."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »