Top 35 Jonathan Galassi Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of great authors are published before their time. That’s not wrong; it’s just the way it works.

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.

Writing is inherently scary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I feel that there is not an endlessly expandable universe of fiction readers.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

John Updike’s first published book was a collection of poems.

After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years.

I’ve always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

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.

Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.

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.

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.

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.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

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.

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.

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.

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