Jonathan Galassi Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 68 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jonathan Galassi.
Famous Quotes By Jonathan Galassi
I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow. — Jonathan Galassi
Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
Love in the flesh remained elusive. It drew yet frightened him. This was the late eighties, after all, the most terrifying days of the plague. Surrounded everywhere by insolent youth and beauty, Paul looked and lusted but didn't dare touch. — Jonathan Galassi
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? — Jonathan Galassi
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out. — Jonathan Galassi
This is a love story. It's about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books. — Jonathan Galassi
There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways. — Jonathan Galassi
I never thought I could write fiction. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
It didn't matter what you said as long as you were quoted. — Jonathan Galassi
As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view. — Jonathan Galassi
A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works. — Jonathan Galassi
For all his profanity and bedroom antics, though, Homer was a relative prude when it came to misbehaving on the page. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
My poems are always about my life in one way or another. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful. — Jonathan Galassi
An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created. — Jonathan Galassi
That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be. — Jonathan Galassi
Publishing would be so wonderful without those wretched authors. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write. — Jonathan Galassi
Don't give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I'm a vindictive Jew!" he'd bellow. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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? — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
Being in love is arguably the least productive of human states. — Jonathan Galassi
When, I want to know, do writers get to simply live their boring lives? — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
I feel that there is not an endlessly expandable universe of fiction readers. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
The literary publishers were the Lords of Culture, the master parasites sitting on top of this swarming dunghill. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi
Writing is inherently scary. — Jonathan Galassi
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. — Jonathan Galassi