I was born to be an editor, I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn’t recognize it.... I edit people’s clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines.... I change everyone’s coiffure—except those that please me—and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect, I edit people’s tones of voice, their laughter, their words. I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear ... It’s this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can’t make things. I can only revise what has been made.
ATTRIBUTION:
Margaret Anderson (1886–1973), U.S. literary editor and autobiographer. My Thirty Years’ War, ch. 2 (1930).
