Lorin Quotes & Sayings

I love having people around who are better interviewers than I am and who can make the time to do a really great job. All of the interviews that we've published are with people who really interest me. — Lorin Stein

In this world, there's even room for quality. — Lorin Maazel

I'm a reader who uses fiction as a way of worrying about life. — Lorin Stein

I don't think much about the issues after they come out. I like it when people like them. Often, when people have criticisms, I find myself agreeing with them. I think some issues are stronger than others. I hope we're getting a little bit better, overall, issue by issue. — Lorin Stein

Don't waste your tremendous voice writing messages in the sand. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

The Universe is made of our thoughts.
Our thoughts are infinite. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

'The Truth About Lorin Jones' will undoubtedly shock and offend as many readers as it will amuse, since it dares to make fun of feminism - of its manners, if not its politics. — Edmund White

I have the feeling that the magazine can reach many more people than it reaches and has something to offer that not everyone knows who should know it. That's why we're starting an app, and that's why we do the blog. But editorially, I think it's mainly a matter of keeping your eyes peeled. You just really don't know what's going to come along. — Lorin Stein

We've never had a giant circulation. And we've always been a magazine for writers and for sophisticated readers. We've never had to run stories that would appeal to a million people. And what you end up with is a kind of tradition that might have staying power - the cockroach after armageddon. — Lorin Stein

I regret that there aren't more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone's head can be freeing. Partly because there's no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we're all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story. — Lorin Stein

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry. — Lorin Stein

The real threat to reading isn't the time we spend hanging out, it's the time we spend online. — Lorin Stein

If you wrote about sex the way Jim [Salter] writes about sex in nonfiction, you would be a sociopath. — Lorin Stein

Pretty much every issue that we've put out, there have been at least one or two things that really surprised me. It sounds like bullshit, but most of the stories that we've run had that effect on me. We get thousands and thousands of submissions and I don't think we've published a story yet - very few, anyway - where there wasn't something like what Mona Simpson described, where a first sentence or a first page didn't just really command attention. — Lorin Stein

Chekhov's stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid - forever. That's a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you're used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office. — Lorin Stein

I like fiction that deals with matters that are of burning importance to us in our private lives. And not all short stories are like that. In general, short stories - and maybe this is a little bit off-topic - but I think short stories have this bad association with, like, waiting rooms. — Lorin Stein

I've never thought that it made sense to put something out that I didn't actually find really fun to read. Or, if not "fun," engaging. My tastes are whatever they are, but I may be a little bit afraid of certain kinds of density. I may get turned off by certain kinds of show-offyness. — Lorin Stein

For me the question that you have to ask, about any magazine, is whether it's needed, whether it's publishing things that no one else could publish, or publish equally well. So there's that. — Lorin Stein

The Beethoven Experience provided the opportunity to solidify the relationship between the Orchestra and me, the Orchestra and me and the public, between all of us and the city of New York, because Beethoven after all is a really amazing point of reference. — Lorin Maazel

Happiness has to exist in the mind before it can exist in life — Lorin Morgan-Richards

Humor bridges the weight of serious reflection. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

I don't know what people should be reading. Only you know what you should be reading. — Lorin Stein

Names don't matter, CVs don't matter, previous publications don't matter at all, because, in a certain way, the ideal is for someone to come completely out of left field. And still, of course, it is hard to say no to a writer who matters a lot to you and who you know matters to your readers. — Lorin Stein

So, short stories have an even harder time, because they tend to get read during the day, between other things. They're interstitial. And yet the content of short stories tends to be very much "nighttime" content. — Lorin Stein

When I was a book editor, I got used to being told that my tastes were dark or edgy. These are not words that would've occurred to me, but I was told that enough that I have to believe it's true - that I like things that some other people find off-putting or upsetting. My job is to publish stuff that I really, really care about. That might mean that it doesn't sit well with everybody. — Lorin Stein

One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

As you get older, the assumption is you get wiser. I try to earn it by not staying still, not resting on laurels. A lot of people in other professions are retired at my age. I care about music more than ever. — Lorin Maazel

A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation. — Lorin Stein

As I look through my box of photos, my eyes well up with tears as I hold in front of me, the one of my brother Spence when he was five years old. He looks so cute in his cowboy outfit, drawing his toy pistols as if he were having a showdown with nasty outlaws. — Terra Lorin

Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap. — Lorin Stein

I hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender ... we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen. — Lorin Stein

What our profession is all about is interacting with people. — Lorin Maazel

Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America's literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world. — Lorin Stein

What is the point of relaying every word when the words become the crime of friendship. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

All adults should strive to be more like children. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell. — Lorin Stein

In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores. — Lorin Maazel

There are two basic defenses for an open ending: one is, If you read carefully enough, you'll know what happened. And the other is, That's how life is: things don't come to neat endings, there isn't a "happily ever after." But if you take that second line of defense, then I think you have to make the point that the writer has shown the range of possibility. — Lorin Stein

I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident. — Lorin Stein

Help me reach a friend in darkness; Help me guide him through the night. Help me show thy path to glory By the Spirit's holy light ... — Lorin F. Wheelwright

In general, short stories are less read than before, they're less published than before and, not surprisingly, they're less taught than before. — Lorin Stein

We should feel empowered by where we came from and who we are, not hide it. It is important to acknowledge that everything we do affects our ancestors as much as they have affected us. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

I'm more thrilled by the short fiction than I expected to be. I've found more pleasure in reading short fiction than I used to. By seeing what kinds of thinking are going on in short fiction. I was also surprised by the panic I've felt, especially at first, when we'd put an issue to bed and then realized we had to put another one together. — Lorin Stein

The fountain of youth resides in our memory. You will never outlive your shadow. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

Use art, be creative. No more war. No more children dying. A pawn that does not move in chess upsets the game. I know there is love in the world still and that is what i wish to surround myself with. Sacrifice your time and energy into something positive instead of the negative and you will see that change around you. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

I think I infuse the music with a new passion. Part of this is because I have fallen in love: I am in love with the New York Philharmonic. The chemistry has just been right. Beyond expectation. — Lorin Maazel

I believe dreams connect us to our ancestors and it is through creativity that we can tap into this in the conscious state. Creativity is a sort of trance that we have as artists that erases time and space. — Lorin Morgan-Richards

Be conscious of this unconscious prayer (of your breath), For She is the most holy place of pilgrimage. She wishes for you to enter this temple, Where each breath is adoration Of the infinite for the incarnate form. — Lorin Roche

To be passionate in today's world is not politically correct ... Nowadays we are supposed to cope. This was not Mahler's problem. He saw it, he heard it, and he expressed it. He was a kaleidoscopic, Olympian figure. — Lorin Maazel