Quote of the Day (William Maxwell, on the Author-Editor Relationship)

“There are times when having an editor is like having a second wife. Who but a wife ever feels they know who you are and what you should do better than you do yourself? And then they have that annoying way of sometimes being right.”—New Yorker fiction editor-novelist William Maxwell (1908-2000), letter from January-February 1963 to Irish writer and friend Frank O’Connor, in The Happiness of Getting It Right: Letters of Frank O’Connor and William Maxwell, 1945-1966, edited by Michael Steinman (1996)

TV Quote of the Day (‘M*A*S*H,’ With Radar Finding It Tough to Get to the Point)

Radar O’Reilly (played by Gary Burghoff): “Sir, I have something to report that I wish I could do almost anything else instead of, but which I guess I got no choice.”

Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda): “Radar, if you bring that sentence in for a fitting I can have it shortened by Wednesday.”—M*A*S*H, Season 4, Episode 14, “The Gun,” original air date Dec. 2, 1975, teleplay by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, directed by Burt Metcalfe

Quote of the Day (Wolcott Gibbs, With Advice to Editors)

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”— New Yorker theater critic Wolcott Gibbs, quoted in Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker, edited by Thomas Vinciguerra (2011)