A Quote by Graydon Carter

There are similarities between being an editor and a tailor. Tailors have a vast supply of fabrics, buttons and thread at their disposal and put it together to make a whole. That's what an editor does - looks at society at a given time and pulls together the interesting aspects into a single issue each month.
You don't usually have to wait a month for a new episode of a TV show. We ask comic readers to wait a month for a new issue, and honestly, given the time that it takes to put them together, a month is really too fast.
But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most.
Which editor? I can't think of one editor I worked with as an editor. The various companies did have editors but we always acted as our own editor, so the question has no answer.
Newspapers have been likened to steamships that move very slowly, in terms of their direction. And when a reporter is sent out on a story, if that reporter has his or her own personal standards and is given a certain amount of time, they're going to probably do as good a story yesterday or tomorrow as they did the day before yesterday when there was a different editor there. But an editor provides vision. An editor decides what's going to be on page one, what gets rewarded, who's given more time, who's given what beats. They set a direction.
I always thought the editor should cut the film and so I'll come in and look at the movie. Just because that's the only way I can really see the ideas of the editor, it's really working together. Yes it's a hierarchy, yes I'm the boss, but I like to see and to think about the idea, and it's about us asking, 'do we have to say that?' and, 'how do we make it there?' So it's advising the editor, it's very give and take, it's very free, but in the end, it's wonderful once you get through the first couple of cuts.
Online, you're providing each other with the good aspects of being together as far as communication and support, but you don't have to deal with the realities of paying bills together, or being annoyed when they leave the toilet seat up or don't put the food away in the fridge.
Of course a magazine is shaped by its editor, and each editor is different.
Being an editor doesn't make you a better writer - or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer.
What's interesting in scripted TV is different than what's interesting in reality TV. Each of their departments have their development process where they package things and put together the writers and put together the producers and the different elements and develop the projects. By the time you get to a network or to a studio, you're able to say this is the project, here's who the producer is, sometimes even here's who the star is, here's who the writer is. It's a well-developed project by the time it gets to the studios.
I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.
One of the good things is the relationship between director and editor used to be more contentious. Studios used to leave directors alone more during the post production process and now they're clamoring to get in. So, the director and the editor end up teaming up sort of against the studio to fight what they're doing and you lose the creative tension that you used to have between an editor and a director.
There are definitely aspects of that kind of stuff. The whole team [of Legends of Tommorow] gets thrown together. They don't really know each other like that. They haven't worked together before.
As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.
There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.
An editor who is a mentor, advisor, and psychiatrist. Don't kid yourself-a good editor will make your book better.
The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.
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