Jonathan Galassi Quotes
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I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
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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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I feel that there is not an endlessly expandable universe of fiction readers.
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Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.
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Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject.
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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.
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John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.
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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.
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I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.
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Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism.
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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.
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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.
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I never thought I could write fiction.
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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?
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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.
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A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works.
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Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.
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I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
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The FSG story starts to lose its fairy-tale aura when filthy lucre invades the sacred enclosure, as it did ubiquitously in the every-man-for-himself Reagan era.
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What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.
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There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.
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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.
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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.
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The Futurists believed in the machine, in making a great big fuss, in being young. For a brief moment, they were arguably the most influential aesthetic provocateurs in the world.