Jonathan Galassi Quotes

Our real poems are already in us / and all we can do is dig. / We can work for years and never find them / or miss them when they stare us in the face.

Writing is inherently scary.

In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write.

This is a love story. It's about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors.

I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.

It didn't matter what you said as long as you were quoted.

When, I want to know, do writers get to simply live their boring lives?

I never thought I could write fiction.

It was one of the realities of publishing: what was truly new often languished in the warehouse nearly unasked-for. One of the tricks of publishing was catching the wave of public taste at the right moment.

Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets.

Well, I thought it was a dog, and the critics did, too. Woof.

When you're in the throes of writing, I find, the lessons you've casually imparted to others are not in the forefront of your mind. Which may be good or bad. Probably both.

I deal with the authors I work with, agents, and other departments of the company, talking about both the books that I'm working on and everyone else's. Then there's dealing with foreign publishers: foreigners visit all the time. People want to bounce things off the publisher, and a lot of it is encouragement.

One thing I have noticed is that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's. You give the author your thoughts, and it's up to him or her to decide what to do.

Out with the old; in with the aftermath.

Most of the smaller houses had been gobbled up by so-called general-interest publishers, most of them now owned in turn by much bigger conglomerates who'd publish anything they could get their hands on that had a chance of making money.

For all his profanity and bedroom antics, though, Homer was a relative prude when it came to misbehaving on the page.

If you've worked in a company for a long time, there's a mythology that you know by heart, you don't need to look it up to evoke. It's there in your blood, as it were.

As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view.

It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.

The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren't thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in.

What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.

There are courses you can take to learn the mechanics of the business, like the Radcliffe course, but I don't think they teach you how to edit.

The thing that happened with the music business, there are no stores anymore where you can buy music. It's all an online business now, and that's, you know - the bookstore culture is a very vibrant part of the American experience that we're very reluctant to see go away.

The literary publishers were the Lords of Culture, the master parasites sitting on top of this swarming dunghill.

One sunny moment, moving inexorably toward sepia.

An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.

He'd come to appreciate that writers were just like everyone else, except when they were more so. It sometimes seemed that they'd been able to develop their gifts thanks to a lack of inhibition, an inner permission to feel and react, that made them seem self-absorbed and insensitive to the existence of anyone else.

That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be.

A publisher - and I write as one - does far more than print and sell a book. It selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer's work.

My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that's destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property.

I wanted to be involved with literature. I certainly wasn't going to be able to write for a living, and I didn't have enough confidence in my talent to think that I should be just doing that. Publishing seemed like fun to me - to be involved with writers. And it did turn out to be.

Poetry is not mainstream, but then neither is serious fiction, really. But I don't think there's a lot to worry about in this particular 'problem'. Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?

Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.

You're not one of those despicable literary sleuths who think he can deduce every last little sordid biographical detail from a writer's work, are you?

Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

There's been a fragmentation of how the market functions, but I believe printed books are here to stay. People like the tactile experience, the smell of them; there's a great romance to them.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.