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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

Fun

Turn

Think

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Work

Far

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

Jonathan Galassi

Deal

Life

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Believe

People

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Jonathan Galassi

Think

Breaks

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "