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
I never thought I could write fiction.
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.
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.
Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.
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.
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?
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.
After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years.
I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.
I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.
Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it.
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.
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've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.
The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.
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.
My poems are always about my life in one way or another.
I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.
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.
What the beautiful-writing writers are most attached to is almost always superfluous.
Writing is inherently scary.
Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.
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 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.
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.
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.
That's one thing about fiction: you can make the world be the way you think it should be.
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.
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.
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.
Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism.
A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes.
As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view.
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.
An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.
I feel that there is not an endlessly expandable universe of fiction readers.
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.
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.
John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.
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.
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.
