Jonathan Galassi Quotes
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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.
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The price of an e-book is a lot less than the price that we're charging for a hardcover book. It's about the same as we charge for a paperback. And that means a different revenue stream.
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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.
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I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do.
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I'll tell you - there's no author that wants to give his mother an e-book of his new book. I think he wants to present her with - or she - wants to present her with something beautiful that he or she created.
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Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it.
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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.
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That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be.
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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.
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Writing is inherently scary.
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I can write anywhere that's quiet. I have a study in my apartment, but I often work in the kitchen of a house that we rent in the country.
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I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
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As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view.
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Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.
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My poems are always about my life in one way or another.
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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.
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After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years.
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I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.
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What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.
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An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.
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Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.
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I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
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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.
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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.