Editors on Editing Quotes

“Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.”
― Samuel S. Vaughan, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do

“I am still actively engaged at the job I like best, which is working with authors and promoting them. But, at this time in my life I have made it a rule to cosset myself by refusing to spend my time on things I plain straight don't like. Our list is a distinguished one. We have managed to keep free of the current phenomenon of big-business publishing; the book stores and our own salesmen expect us to give them books we believe in.”
― John C. Farrar, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do

“Fantasy and science fiction are closely allied in publishing, since both categories posit worlds that are not reality. The SF editor is most often a fantasy editor as well. Yet the most useful view for the working editor is to consider fantasy as conservative and pastoral, and SF as radical, technological, urban. There is a spectrum of variations, especially considering that for at least the last half century, many of the same authors have written both, a legacy, again, of the pulp magazines, which published both in the early twentieth century, before the battle lines were clearly drawn.”
― David G. Hartwell, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do

“Far more important than being the first, be willing to settle for the best.”
― M. Lincoln Schuster, Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do