Lions and hyenas are the permanent, deadly enemies of the animal world. Writers and editors replicate their enduring hostility in the literary world.
Some favorite quotes capture this animosity. First, about writers:
"Read over your compositions, and where you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." – Samuel Johnson.
Samuel Johnson.
- "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." – Thomas Mann.
- "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." – Ernest Hemingway.
- "Editing is the same as quarreling with writers." – Harold Ross.
And about editors:
- Editors "are human beavers, industrious little creatures who work hard and shrink from the public gaze." – P.G. Wodehouse.
- "The fact that I have never killed an editor is proof that the death penalty deters." – Thomas Sowell.
- "An editor is one who separates the wheat from the chaff and prints the chaff." – Adlai Stevenson.
- "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft." – H. G. Wells.
And finally, about publishers:
- "I always used to think that publishers had to be devilish intelligent fellows, loaded down with the grey matter; but I've got their number now. All a publisher has to do is to write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work." – P.G. Wodehouse.
Feb. 16, 2021 update: A BBC Saturday Night radio drama, The Fatal Flaw by Chris Allen, has been posted. Originally broadcast on Feb. 20, 1982, it represents an author's ultimate editor horror story, hard as that may be to imagine, with even threats of murder included.
