on writing - editing

Bits of encouragement for those presently editing stories short and long:

It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
- C. J. Cherryh

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer.
But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity,
and destroy most of it.   - Colette

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore
for the reader who reads.   - Dr. Seuss

By Elena Hormiga

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of
good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune,
and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress,
compress.   - Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.
- Jeanne Voelker

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever
published. My pencils outlast their erasers.    
- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I leave out the parts that people skip.   - Elmore Leonard 

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.   - Albert Einstein

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
- William Zinsser

The shorter and the plainer the better.   - Beatrix Potter