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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. "

Jonathan Galassi

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" 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

" I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful. "

Jonathan Galassi

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Jonathan Galassi

" I never thought I could write fiction. "

Jonathan Galassi

" I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings. "

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

" 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

" 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'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

" 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

" Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism. "

Jonathan Galassi

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow. "

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

" As the publisher of FSG and the custodian of its legacy, I have an interested insider's view. "

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

" 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