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In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger that we face today.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

In the world of book writing, an author really gets to have control over what he or she writes, which is why it is very satisfying. With the help of a great compatible editor, you really have something in the end you can call your own.

One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.

An editor is an accomplice, looking in from the outside. That objective view is essential. We don't write in a vacuum, and we don't publish in a vacuum.

As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.