Spiked

The best quotes that didn't make the cut in 2025

When I was a week into my journalism Masters degree, our tutor taught the class a valuable writing lesson. “Kill your babies,” she said.

It’s not actually as gruesome as it sounds. It’s a common writing technique, which essentially means you need to remove the fluff when self-editing your work. You can’t be precious about any excess words (no matter how poetic), unnecessarily long introductions, or that paragraph where you go off on an interesting tangent. It may be your favourite bit of the piece, but if it’s superfluous and/or fails to add anything of real value to your storytelling, you should get rid. It helps to avoid overwriting, brings your piece within the commissioned word count (a career-long struggle for me), and usually makes the piece a sharper, better read.

One hazard though, is that some lovely tidbits or quotes from interviewees will inevitably get spiked (a journalism term that refers to a sharp piece of metal which used to live on newspaper editors’ desks, where discarded stories would quite literally be skewered).

It’s a common frustration for writers, leaving out special quotes or insights you get from interviews which don’t quite fit with the direction or subject of a piece. I recently saw an Instagram post about this by Felicia Pennant, the brilliant founder and editor-in-chief of SEASON Zine. She’s started sharing some of these “lost” moments with her followers and inspired me to revisit some of my interviews over the last 12 months.

In this post, I’ve cherry-picked my favourite soundbites which were regrettably left on the cutting room floor.